Conversation-Driven Development with Claude Code

Now that you’re comfortable installing Claude Code and launching it, it’s time to explore the core operations that transform how you work with code. In this lesson, we’ll focus on three fundamental skills that every Claude Code user should gain proficiency in: understanding your codebase, finding the right files, and fixing bugs.

These basics form the foundation of your development workflow. By the end of this lesson, you’ll be comfortable having conversations with Claude about your code, navigating projects efficiently, and making improvements with confidence.

What is conversation-driven development?

Before we discuss specific techniques, clarify how working with Claude Code differs from traditional code exploration. This goes beyond using a different tool; it is an entirely new approach to understanding and working with code.

Traditionally, you explore code by browsing files one at a time, searching for patterns, and mentally piecing together connections. This is detective work: time‑consuming and cognitively expensive.

With Claude Code, you flip the process.

• Ask, don’t search: Instead of manually searching for information, ask direct questions about what you want to understand.

• Get structured explanations: Claude reads the relevant code and gives you organized, contextual answers.

• Build understanding iteratively: Each question builds on the previous one to create a guided learning path.

• Maintain conversational context: Exploration happens in one flowing conversation where context accumulates.

The key insight is simple: you get faster and better answers.

Having productive conversations with your codebase

Now that you understand the mental model, let’s put it into practice. Effective conversation‑driven development follows a pattern that maximizes understanding while minimizing cognitive load.

The most powerful feature of Claude Code is its ability to understand and explain code holistically. When you join a new project or return to code you wrote months ago, Claude can help you get up to speed quickly by providing a comprehensive overview. The best way to start understanding any codebase is to ask Claude for a broad overview. Think of this as a guided tour of your project from something that can read and understand the code instantly.

Here’s the fundamental prompt that should initiate every codebase exploration:

This first interaction provides a high-level overview before you look into specific components.. At this stage, you aren’t jumping headfirst into specific code; you are mapping the landscape, the technologies in play, and how the project is organized.

Once you have the general overview, ask increasingly specific questions. Let each answer inform your next question so you build understanding systematically.

Notice how each prompt builds on the previous understanding. Start with architecture, move to data flow, and then explore specific subsystems. This creates a strong learning path.

Why don’t you go ahead and try the prompts yourself to see Claude Code in action?

When you ask Claude Code for a codebase overview, Claude systematically explores the project structure, reads configuration files, analyzes dependencies, and maps relationships between components. It might tell you that the project is built with Astro and that it’s a blog application, listing technologies (TypeScript, Tailwind, Markdown), directory structure, and features such as dark‑mode support and type‑safe content management. This becomes the foundation for your subsequent conversations.

Finding the right files

Traditional development involves a lot of searching for files, functions, and implementations. With Claude Code, you simply ask direct questions based on what you want to accomplish. For example, in our Astro blog project:

These questions are contextual to our specific project. Claude understands that you’re working with an Astro blog, so it can give you precise answers about Tailwind configs, content collections, and Astro components rather than generic advice. The better the question, the better the answer. Try the above prompts or any others you have in the terminal above.

The main takeaway is that when we ask Claude Code to find files, something powerful happens that goes beyond simple text matching. In the examples above, Claude doesn’t just locate the tailwind.config.mjs file; it also reads the current configuration, understands the request to add a custom color, and proposes the specific code changes needed. When asked about dark mode implementation, Claude performs multiple intelligent searches, reads the relevant files, and provides a complete explanation of how the feature works across components. This is the difference between finding files and understanding systems. Claude gives us not just locations, but actionable insights about what to modify and why.

Fixing bugs with Claude Code

Bug fixing with Claude Code shifts from manual detective work to guided, structured problem solving. We’ve prepared an Astro project with some intentional errors for you to practice with.

If you run the code widget below, you’ll notice a bug where the dark mode/light mode toggle isn’t showing proper emojis, and instead, you see random characters. This is a perfect example of a subtle issue that can be tricky to debug manually, but is easily caught by Claude Code.

When you run, Claude will spin up while the Astro project starts in the background. Ask Claude Code to identify and fix this emoji display issue. Try a prompt like: “The dark mode toggle is showing random characters instead of proper emojis. Can you identify what’s wrong and fix it?” Then, check the output tab to see if the bug has been resolved.

Traditional debugging involves reading error messages, tracing through code line by line, and often spending hours isolating the root cause. With Claude Code, you get immediate analysis that not only identifies the problem, but also explains why it happened and how to prevent it. Claude reads your entire codebase context, understands the relationships between files, and can spot issues that might not be obvious from error messages alone. More importantly, it provides educational explanations that help you become a better developer by understanding the underlying patterns that lead to bugs.