Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic’s agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, IDE, desktop app, or browser. It reads your entire codebase, plans a multi-file approach to a task, writes the code, runs tests, and fixes failures, with you reviewing the result rather than guiding every step. It is built on Claude, Anthropic’s family of large language models (LLMs), and is aimed at developers who want an assistant that can carry out a coding task end to end instead of just answering questions about code. For teams shipping AI products, Claude Code is often the tool that writes a large share of the code itself.

How Claude Code works

You give Claude Code an instruction in plain English, either as a one-off prompt or as an ongoing conversation, and it takes it from there. Here is what happens step by step:

• Agentic search: Claude Code scans your project structure and dependencies to understand the codebase without you manually selecting which files matter.
• Planning: For non-trivial tasks, it lays out a plan of the files it needs to touch and the order it will touch them in, so you can review the approach before it starts editing.
• Execution: It edits files directly, runs terminal commands, and executes your test suite, checking its own output against the result.
• Iteration: If a test fails or a command errors, Claude Code reads the failure, adjusts its approach, and tries again without needing you to paste the error back in.
• Git integration: Once the work is done, it can stage changes, write a commit message, create a branch, and open a pull request directly from the terminal.
• Memory: A CLAUDE.md file in your project root stores standing instructions like coding conventions and architecture notes, so context persists across sessions instead of resetting every time.

What you can build with Claude Code

• Automated bug fixes: Paste an error message or describe a symptom, and Claude Code traces it through your codebase, finds the root cause, and implements a fix.
• Full feature implementation: Describe a feature in plain language and let Claude Code write the code across every file it touches, from the backend logic to the UI.
• Custom MCP integrations: Connect Claude Code to your own tools and data sources through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for linking AI agents to external systems, so it can read tickets, pull design docs, or query a database mid-task.
• CI-driven code review: Wire Claude Code into GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to automatically review pull requests and triage new issues as they come in.
• Multi-agent workflows: Spawn several Claude Code sessions to work on different parts of a task at once, with a lead agent coordinating subtasks and merging the results.
• Scheduled maintenance tasks: Set up recurring tasks like overnight CI failure analysis, weekly dependency audits, or automatic documentation updates after every merge.