Running Claude Code in a Loop: The Script That Turns It Into a Persistent Agent

Claude Code is built for interactive sessions. You type, it acts, the conversation ends. That is the right shape for a developer at a keyboard. It is the wrong shape for an agent that needs to keep watch on something. A queue. An inbox. A file. A webhook. A remote service. To turn Claude Code into a persistent worker you wrap it in a loop. This post is the wrapper. I will start with the fifteen-line shell version that gets you running in a minute, then walk through the persistent stream-json ver