The Secret Life of Claude Code: Reading Code You Didn't Write

How to orient yourself in an unfamiliar codebase — and how Claude Code can help you find your footing without losing your judgment Margaret is a senior software engineer. Timothy is her junior colleague. They work in a grand Victorian library in London — the kind of place where inherited collections are treated with respect, and where no one pretends to have read something they haven't. Timothy has arrived today with someone else's problem. Episode 6 The Inheritance He set the printed file listing on the table without saying anything. Margaret looked at it the way she sometimes looked at things — unhurried, reading from the top. It was long. "Whose is it?" she said. "It was Marcus's. He left in February. It's a billing integration — handles subscription renewals, proration calculations, payment retries, webhook processing." He paused. "There's no documentation. There are comments, but most of them describe what the code does, not why it does it." "And you need to do what with it?" "Add