Helpline

Helpline is a B2B helpdesk and customer-support platform — an internal monorepo where five services (api, auth, billing, notifications, search) talk over HTTP and share two internal packages (core, db). It's the kind of mid-sized, multi-service codebase where an AI coding agent either pays for itself or quietly makes a mess: shared packages that everything imports, money rules that must never silently regress, a request gateway with its own conventions, and tests scattered across services.

Quick start

What this repo actually is. Helpline is a demonstration codebase, built for the YouTube video "The AI Layer: How to Make Claude Code Work in Large Codebases." It is a deliberately realistic — but compact — complex codebase, used to show concretely how to build an AI Layer — our name for the harness of configuration and tooling that Anthropic's article describes in How Claude Code works in large codebases. (The article describes the harness and its components; "AI Layer" is our term for it, not Anthropic's.) That article is the what and the why, and it is excellent — but it stays high-level. Helpline is the how: every component from the article, built and validated on a real codebase. The rest of this repo is written as if Helpline were a live product, because that is exactly how you should treat your own codebase when you give it an AI Layer.

Run it:

git clone https://github.com/coleam00/helpline.git
cd helpline
uv sync --extra dev
uv run pytest                 # the application's own test suite

See the AI Layer: read AI-LAYER.md — it maps every component to the article and to where it lives in this repo. Then run the validator, which proves every piece works end to end:

uv run --extra dev python tooling/validate/validate_all.py   # 13/13

The AI Layer, concretely

Every codebase you ship with an AI agent has three parts: code, tests, and — the new one — the AI Layer: the configuration, context, and reusable workflows that make an agent productive in your codebase. Helpline builds every component the article names:

The git history is the before/after, on purpose: commit 1 is Helpline with no AI Layer; commit 2 adds the entire layer.

Take this to your own codebase

Helpline is not just something to read — it is something to reuse. There are two ways, and both matter more than the codebase itself.

1. Install the plugin — the fastest path

The portable, repo-agnostic pieces of the AI Layer are bundled as a Claude Code plugin at tooling/helpline-ai-layer/. From your own project:

/plugin marketplace add /path/to/helpline/tooling
/plugin install helpline-ai-layer@helpline-tooling

That one install gives your repo:

• the self-improving Stop hook — reflects on each session and proposes CLAUDE.md updates, so your layer never silently rots;
• the read-only explorer subagent — maps a subsystem without burning your main session's context;
• the codebase-search MCP — AST-based structured search;
• a generic scoped-tests skill.

These are deliberately layout-agnostic: the hooks follow your CLAUDE.md hierarchy, and the MCP discovers your source by walking the repo. Nothing is tied to Helpline's directory names.

2. Point your coding agent at this repo

You don't have to copy anything by hand. Clone Helpline, open it alongside your project, and tell your agent something like:

Read AI-LAYER.md and the .claude/ folder in the Helpline repo. It is a worked example of the AI Layer from Anthropic's large-codebases article. Build a comparable AI Layer for this codebase — a CLAUDE.md hierarchy, hooks, skills, an MCP, a subagent — adapted to our structure and conventions.

AI-LAYER.md exists for exactly this. It is an agent-readable map from each article concept to the artifact that implements it, plus the proof that it works. The repo is a reference implementation your agent can learn the pattern from — not boilerplate to clone blindly.

What travels, and what you rebuild

The repo-specific pieces aren't reusable content — but they are reusable templates. Copy the shape, change the substance.

Layout

services/
  api/            HTTP gateway — routes, request handling
  auth/           authentication — tokens, password hashing
  billing/        subscriptions + invoicing
  notifications/  outbound email + templating
  search/         ticket search indexing + queries
packages/
  core/           shared domain models + error types
  db/             database connection + repositories
infra/            docker-compose for local dev
scripts/          one-off operational scripts
tests/            cross-service integration tests
tooling/          the AI Layer's MCP server, the plugin, and the validators

Each service owns its own area. packages/core and packages/db are imported by every service — change them carefully.

Dev

uv sync --extra dev      # install
uv run pytest            # full test suite
uv run pyright           # type-check