Claude Clue #10: Give Your Codebase a Health Checkup

Your codebase accumulates tech debt. It doesn't matter if humans wrote it, AI wrote it, or some messy combination of both. Over time, you get forgotten TODO comments (we are all guilty of it), outdated libraries (I promise, not the security patched ones), and that slow process you never got around to fixing that actually has a memory leak. The code runs fine, but there's stuff lurking underneath. I've started running periodic audits with Claude, and it turns out Claude is annoyingly good at finding the things I (or it) missed. Every dozen features or fixes, I have Claude do a comprehensive health checkup.

Here's what this looks like: I ask Claude to identify all the areas worth auditing: UI patterns, database interactions, middleware, framework-specific stuff—and then have it spin up agents to check each area simultaneously. It pools the results into a severity-ranked list of issues. I'll often run it twice and compare results just to catch anything that slipped through. Then Claude helps me build a repair plan. It never hurts to get that outside perspective, even if 'outside' is a model that's been staring at your code for weeks.

Almost entirely human. Mostly.

Thanks Roscoe for finding that memory leak 😉!