Been using Claude Code heavily and there’s a pattern I can’t shake: it won’t reuse your existing components unless you explicitly tell it to. Every time. Ask it to build something similar to what already exists, and it’ll spin up a fresh implementation. Correct, passing tests, completely duplicated logic. The fix that sort of works: reference specific files and components in your prompt. “Before implementing, check X. Reuse Y.” Basically you have to be the architectural memory the tool doesn’t have. But this gets exhausting. You’re spending cognitive effort on something that a mid-level engineer would just do instinctively. I think the engineers who’ll benefit most from these tools long-term aren’t better prompters — they’re the ones building codebases where the structure itself guides the AI toward reuse. Clear conventions, obvious shared modules, well-named abstractions. Anyone else dealing with this? Curious what strategies are working for you. submitted by /u/ihoka
Originally posted by u/ihoka on r/ClaudeCode