Comprehend

You are working in an unfamiliar codebase. Before you touch anything, understand what you're dealing with.

Break the problem into pieces. Use a persistent REPL to store everything you learn. Fan out subagents to do the reading. Keep your own context window small and available for the actual work — edits, debugging, reasoning.

That is the entire method. What follows is how to do it.

When to Use This

Use this workflow whenever you are making changes in code you don't already understand. This includes: