basemind is my code-intelligence tool: a pure-Rust code map and scanner, tree-sitter across 300+ languages, a content-addressed blob store, a Fjall-backed inverted index. I harden it by pointing it at a repo big enough to hurt, a 20M-line, 200k-commit monorepo, and watching what it does.
I did this debugging session with Claude Code. It started as "which version is installed?" and ended with a 7x speedup, two upstream PRs, and a feature turned off. Here is how I worked, and the methods that made it effective.
The symptom is not the bug
The report: basemind's cache grew from 1.8 GB to 4 GB while CPU pinned for a long time. I did not open the scanner code. I looked at the live system. ps and lsof found a process at ~70% CPU holding the index open, and it was a serve process, not a scan. Different bug entirely.
That process was an old release. So I had Claude dig through git instead of the debugger: git log on the watcher, then git merge-base --is-ancestor and commit dates. A commit titled "fix: stop watcher CPU runaway" was dated four days after the running binary shipped. The bug (a watcher re-scanning its own writes forever) was already fixed. It was a stale process left over from another editor session.
