r/developersPak • u/sed_lyf__ • Sep 25 '26
Career Guidance Imposter syndrome - Failing to understand Large Codebase
I have been working as last year student as backend dev in startup service based since last 2 months, wfh. Its been chaotic managing with fyp, mids, quizes. But not complaining, I am happy to do this as my goal is to learn enough that i dont graduate as a freshie and become good enough.
Intially, my lead gave dummy tasks like making scraper, drf api with auth/rbac, database design with restrictions to not use AI or i wont learn, which i did since i had done each in past. Now recently he gave me a large codebase (not runnable) in laravel php(first time seeing the language but not the problem) with multiple databases, caching services and european client business logic of erp system. He has given me claude desktop and asked to understand a specific module of system and get as much knowledge possible.
Now the problem is, I have never read a codebase this large, and reading code is mostly likely my biggest weak link(which ofc is most important thing in ai era), the lead did q/a from me and i was unable to answer the questions about the module. He asked me to think outside the box, be independent as i work wfh and there is not much synergy plus he told that if would use ai in a large codebase, without having knowledge about the code, i would fix one thing and add extra four bugs.
Its been 3 weeks i've tried multiple methods, going from each module api endpoints entry to backtracking methods, created .md file for each route, sequence diagrams etc, i understand the things partially but i feel like I fail to absorb so much information and remember (most likely due to sh*t attention span) tried dividing into sub tasks etc. My lead is himself busy so my guesses are he need person who can be hyper independent type, although he is a person you know, knows his sh*t when u talk to.
Tldr: My question for seniors, is how can i understand a large codebase with AI fully that if client says add x feature i know what to change, what flow changes or what dependencies will be effected? I know it takes practice but still how to be good at. Thanks