Structuring Claude Code for Multi-Repo Workspaces

Claude Code understands one repo at a time. Most teams have thirty. Microservices, shared libraries, infrastructure-as-code, frontend apps, data pipelines, all in separate git repos. Start Claude Code in one and ask about another, and it has no context. It doesn't know the workspace exists. Here's how I've been setting this up to work across repositories. The problem When you start Claude Code in orders/order-service , it has no idea that orders/orders-ui exists next door, or that shared libraries live in shared/ , or that the data team's Spark jobs are in analytics/ . Every session starts with you explaining the workspace layout. The same problem shows up when someone new joins the team. They clone one repo, but they don't know what other repos exist, how they relate, or where to look for shared infrastructure. A bootstrap repo as the workspace root The approach I landed on: a bootstrap repo that sits above all the other repos as the workspace root. It doesn't contain application code