Dictionary term
Claude Code
Anthropic's agentic coding tool that reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands and integrates with your development tools, available in the terminal, IDEs, a desktop app and the browser. It is extended with CLAUDE.md files, skills, subagents, hooks, MCP servers and plugins, and the Claude Agent SDK exposes the same agent loop and tools for building your own agents.
In plain English
An AI coding assistant from Anthropic that works directly in your project: it reads your code, makes the edits, runs the commands and tests, and reports back.
Analogy
Like a developer teammate working directly in your project folder, not just chatting about code.
Why it matters
It lets you build and ship automation scripts and integrations with Claude doing the actual file edits and commands.
In practice
Telling Claude Code to add error handling to a script and it edits the files and runs the tests.
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Sources
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