Helpline

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:

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:

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*…