As your ASP.NET Core Minimal API project expands, you’ve likely experienced the pain of a single Program.cs file becoming a monolithic beast. Scrolling through hundreds of endpoint definitions quickly becomes an exercise in frustration, hindering discoverability and making maintenance a chore. You know there has to be a better way to group related endpoints and keep your code clean, but manually refactoring can be time-consuming and error-prone.
This is where Claude Code can dramatically improve your workflow. Claude Code’s intelligent understanding of your codebase allows it to suggest and even perform structural refactorings. For Minimal APIs, a common and effective pattern is to group endpoints by domain or feature. Claude can help you identify logical groupings and extract them into separate files or classes, making your Program.cs much more digestible.
Let’s say you have several endpoints related to user management. Instead of having them scattered, you can prompt Claude to consolidate them. Imagine a scenario where you have endpoints for GET /users, POST /users, and PUT /users/{id}. You can use Claude’s capabilities to extract these into a UserEndpoints.cs file, for instance. The Claude CLI command can be used to initiate these kinds of refactorings.
claude refactor --type extract-endpoints --feature-name users --source-file Program.cs --output-dir Endpoints
This command, while conceptual in its exact parameters without a specific Claude Code CLI documentation to reference, represents the intent to use Claude to identify and extract endpoints related to “users” from Program.cs and place them into a new directory named Endpoints. The actual implementation would involve Claude analyzing your Program.cs, identifying the relevant MapGet, MapPost, etc., calls, and generating the necessary C# code in the new location, updating Program.cs to delegate to the new file.
Try it: If you have a Program.cs with several distinct sets of endpoints, try to imagine how you’d describe one of those sets to Claude and prompt it to extract them into a new partial class or a separate file, similar to the concept shown above. This mental exercise alone can help you visualize the benefits of using an AI assistant for code organization.