Dive into Claude Code

The Design Space of Today's and Future AI Agent Systems

English | 中文

A comprehensive source-level architectural analysis of Claude Code (v2.1.88, ~1,900 TypeScript files, ~512K lines of code), combined with a curated collection of community analyses, a design-space guide for agent builders, and cross-system comparisons.

[!TIP] TL;DR -- Only 1.6% of Claude Code's codebase is AI decision logic. The other 98.4% is deterministic infrastructure -- permission gates, context management, tool routing, and recovery logic. The agent loop is a simple while-loop; the real engineering complexity lives in the systems around it. This repo dissects that architecture and distills it into actionable design guidance for anyone building AI agent systems.

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Table of Contents

From Our Paper

• 🌟 Key Highlights
• 📖 Reading Guide
• 🏗️ Architecture at a Glance
• 🧭 Values and Design Principles
• 🔄 The Agentic Query Loop
• 🛡️ Safety and Permissions
• 🧩 Extensibility
• 🧠 Context and Memory
• 👥 Subagent Delegation
• 💾 Session Persistence

Beyond the Paper

• 🛰️ New Signals in the Agent Design Space
• 🛠️ Build Your Own AI Agent: A Design Guide
• ⚖️ Cross-System Comparison: Claude Code vs OpenClaw vs Hermes-Agent
• 🔎 Find Resources by Design Question
• 🌐 Community Projects & Research
• 🚀 Other Notable AI Agent Projects
• 🤝 Contributing
• 🔖 Citation

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Key Highlights

• 98.4% Infrastructure, 1.6% AI -- The agent loop is a simple while-loop; the real complexity is permission gates, context management, and recovery logic.
• 5 Values → 13 Principles → Implementation -- Every design choice traces back to human authority, safety, reliability, capability, and adaptability.
• Bounded Analysis with an Approval Fallback -- In the legacy shell-parser path, more than 50 subcommands triggers an ask decision.
• 2 CVEs Revealed a Pre-Trust Window -- In earlier releases, MCP servers and settings environment variables took effect before the user accepted the trust dialog.
• The Cross-Cutting Harness Resists Reimplementation -- The loop is easy to copy; hooks, classifier, compaction, and isolation are not.

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Reading Guide

If you are a...	Start here	Then read
Agent Builder	Build Your Own Agent	Architecture Deep Dive
Security Researcher	Safety and Permissions	Architecture: Safety Layers
Product Manager	Key Highlights	Values and Principles
Researcher	Full Paper (arXiv)	Community Resources