5 Things I Learned Reverse-Engineering Claude Code's Architecture

Everyone talks about AI Agents, but almost nobody shows you what a production-grade one actually looks like inside. I spent weeks analyzing Claude Code's TypeScript source code — Anthropic's CLI that lets Claude write code, run commands, and manage files on your machine. What I found challenged a lot of my assumptions about how AI Agents work in practice. Here are the 5 most surprising things I discovered. 1. The Core Loop Is Deceptively Simple Strip away everything, and Claude Code's brain is a