Beyond the Single Repo: How I Use Claude Code Across Microservices

As a backend engineer, I spend most of my time inside microservice architectures. And if you've worked in this world, you know the point: you're deep into one service and suddenly you need to understand how your changes ripple across the system. Which services consume this event? What breaks downstream if I change this contract? When everything lives in a single repository, Claude Code handles this beautifully — you drop a CLAUDE.md file at the root and it has all the context it needs. But microservices live in separate repos. That's where things get interesting. The setup The idea starts with a parent folder containing all your microservice repositories: platform/ ├── CLAUDE.md ← high-level system overview ├── user-service/ │ └── CLAUDE.md ← service-specific context ├── order-service/ │ └── CLAUDE.md ← service-specific context ├── notification-service/ │ └── CLAUDE.md ← service-specific context └── ... Each microservice keeps its own CLAUDE.md — minimal, focused: what the service does