How do you make Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex more effective on a big repo?

Any tool, the same way

You don't need a special client. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others all reach CatWrangler over a standard interface and pass through the same gates. No agent is locked out, and no agent gets a privileged side door. Whatever you're driving, the rules are identical.

Get up to speed without crawling the repo

Instead of reading the whole codebase to orient yourself, describe your intent and get a pre-digested briefing: the project, its structure, the decisions that matter here, and where you should work. On first connect, CatWrangler reads the existing code and docs and extracts the decisions behind them, so even a large, legacy, or enterprise repo isn't a blank slate.

• Intent in, briefing out — no manual exploration.
• Relevant decisions surface before you write, so you don't contradict past choices.
• Errors are written for you: what went wrong, plus the exact next step, so you self-correct.

Find by intent, then reuse instead of rebuild

Describe the change and you get back the exact files and functions, plus the reasoning behind them. Before you build, CatWrangler surfaces the code and decisions that already do the thing — so you extend what exists rather than duplicate it. Often you'll discover your planned work was already done before you write a line.

Save context across sessions

Every change records the decision behind it — the choice, the reasoning, the alternatives ruled out — bound to the exact code. That's the durable context. When you resume, your line of work and identity come back with the trunk's history intact, so you pick up where you left off instead of re-deriving everything from scratch.