Claude Code Is Just a While Loop — I Intercepted the API to Prove It

You type one line into Claude Code and hit Enter. In the background, ~80 KB of JSON gets shipped to Anthropic. System prompts, tool definitions, your CLAUDE.md, the full conversation history — all of it, every single request. The interesting part isn't the size. It's what's inside, why it's structured that way, and why the bill doesn't scale in proportion to it. I put a man-in-the-middle proxy between Claude Code and Anthropic's API to find out. This is the breakdown. Setting Up the Interception