You're paying Claude 3x too much to understand your code
I ask Claude what breaks if I change a function, and I watch what it does. It greps, opens a file, greps again, opens three more, and keeps going until it's confident or out of patience. On my own codebase that one question takes 15 tool calls and 52.9 seconds.
With Pharaoh connected (I build Pharaoh), it takes one call and 10.2 seconds.
That's the whole idea. Pharaoh maps your repo into a graph of functions, callers, modules, endpoints and cron jobs, and hands it to your AI agent over MCP. Your agent stops reading the codebase one street sign at a time and starts reading the map.
The numbers
I asked Claude Code (Opus 5.5) the questions developers ask before they change code, with Pharaoh and without, three times each, and graded every answer against an expected-item key derived from the TypeScript compiler. On questions about how code connects in my own repository:
33.4 s → 13.6 s per question.
17.0¢ → 5.9¢ per question.
100% → 100% of the expected items mentioned.
Less than half the time, about a third of the cost, the same expected items named. Across two graded runs, Claude with