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How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

mihaileric.com

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Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#111

Post by lmeyerov »

btown wrote: post #98
lmeyerov wrote: post #63

Something I would add is planning. A big "aha" for effective use of these tools is realizing they run on dynamic TODO lists. Ex: Plan mode is basically bootstrapping how that TODO list gets seeded and how todos ground themselves when they get reached, and user interactions are how you realign the todo lists. The todolist is subtle but was a big shift in coding tools, and many seem to be surprised when we discuss it -…

I'm unsure of its accuracy/provenance/outdatedness, but this purportedly extracted system prompt for Claude Code provides a lot more detail about TODO iteration and how powerful it can be: https://gist.github.com/wong2/e0f34aac66caf890a332f7b6f9e2ba... https://gist.github.com/wong2/e0f34aac66caf890a332f7b6f9e2ba... I find it fascinating that while in theory one could just append these as reasoning tokens to the conte…

I find in coding + investigating there's a lot of mileage to being fancier on the todo list. Eg, we make sure timestamps, branches, outcomes, etc are represented. It's impressive how far they get with so little!

For coding, I actually fully take over the todo list in codex + claude: https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry/blob/master/ai/pr...

In Louie.ai, for investigations, we're experimenting with enabling more control of it, so you can go with the grain, vs that kind of wholecloth replacement

Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#114

Post by cadamsdotcom »

The devil is in the details, so actually, the Emperor in this analogy most definitely does have clothes.

For example, post-training / finetuning the model specifically to use the tools it’ll be given in the harness. Or endlessly tweaking the system prompt to fine-tune the model’s behavior to a polish.

Plus - both OpenAI and Qwen have models specifically intended for coding.

Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#115

Post by tptacek »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #103
tptacek wrote: post #54

What's interesting to me about the question of whether you could realistically compete with Claude Code (not Claude, but the CLI agent) is that the questions boil down to things any proficient developer could do. No matter how much I'd want to try, I have no hope of building a competitive frontier model --- "frontier model" is a distinctively apt term. But there's no such thing as a "frontier agent", and the Charmbra…

> the Charmbracelet people have as much of a shot at building something truly exception as Anthropic does. Yes and no. OpenCode is a great example of yes. But at the same time Anthropic gets to develop both client and model together. THey get to use the signals from the client, and "bake in" some of the things into the model. So their model will work best with their client. And somewhat less competent with other clie…

Anthropic has obvious advantages and I'm not saying there's a level playing field (they also have the financial resources of a mid-sized industrialized nation). I'm saying that there's an absolute limit to how much work you could personally do on a frontier model, and that limit doesn't exist for agents; you could realistically clever your way out ahead of Claude Code --- who knows? We've only had these things working for real for a year.

Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#116

Post by joshmlewis »

This is cool but as someone that's built an enterprise grade agentic loop in-house that's processing a billion plus tokens a month, there are so many little things you have to account for that greatly magnify complexity in real world agentic use cases. For loops are an easy way to get your foot in the door and is indeed at the heart of it all, but there are a multitude of a little things that compound complexity rather quickly. What happens when a user sends a message after the first one and the agent has already started the tool loop? Seems simple, right? If you are receiving inputs via webhooks (like from a Slack bot), then what do you do? It's not rocket science but it's also not trivial to do right. What about hooks (guardrails) and approvals? Should you halt execution mid-loop and wait or implement it as an async Task feature like Claude Code and the MCP spec? If you do it async then how do you wake the agent back up? Where is the original tool call stored and how is the output stored for retrieval/insertion? This and many other little things add up and compound on each other.

I should start a blog with my experience from all of this.

Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#117

Post by pama »

prodigycorp wrote: post #3

This article was more true than not a year ago but now the harnesses are so far past the simple agent loop that I'd argue that this is not even close to an accurate mental model of what claude code is doing.

Agreed. You can get a better model using the codex-cli repo and having an agent help you analyze the core functionality.

Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#118

Post by ewoodrich »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #52
shpongled wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't. The "I'm an expert at AI detection" crowd likes to cite things like "It's not X, it's Y" and other expression patterns without stopping to think that perhaps LLMs regurgitate those patterns because they are frequently used in written speech. I assign a <5% probability that GP comment was AI written. It's easy to tell, because AI writing has no soul.

The message is 100% AI written. And if you click on their username and check their comment history you'll see that ALL their comments are "identical". Just do it, you'll see it by the 5th message. No one talks like that. No one talks like that on every message.

Exactly, if a comment just feels a little off but you're unsure, do a quick scan of the profile, takes 15-30 seconds at most to get sufficient signal.

If it's actually AI, the pattern becomes extremely obvious reading them back-to-back. If no clear pattern, I'll happily give them the benefit of the doubt at that point. I don't particularly care if someone occasionally cleans up a post with an LLM as long as there is a real person driving it and it's not overused.

The other day on Reddit I saw a post in r/sysadmin that absolutely screamed karma farming AI and it was really depressing seeing a bunch of people defending them as the victim of an anti-AI mob without noticing the entire profile was variations of generic "Does anyone else dislike [Tool X], am I alone? [generic filler] What does everyone else think?" posts.

Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#119

Post by shnpln »

lmeyerov wrote: post #63

Something I would add is planning. A big "aha" for effective use of these tools is realizing they run on dynamic TODO lists. Ex: Plan mode is basically bootstrapping how that TODO list gets seeded and how todos ground themselves when they get reached, and user interactions are how you realign the todo lists. The todolist is subtle but was a big shift in coding tools, and many seem to be surprised when we discuss it -…

Oh yes, I commonly add something like "Use a very granular todo list for this task" at the end of my prompts. And sometimes I will say something like "as your last todo, go over everything you just did again and use a linter or other tools to verify your work is high quality"

Re: How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

#120

Post by loeg »

Would be nice to have a different wrapper around Claude, even something bare bones, as long as it's easy to modify. Claude code terminal has the jankiest text editor I've ever used -- holding down backspace just moves the cursor. It's something about the key repeat rate. If you manually press backspace repeatedly, it's fine, but a rapid repeat rate confuses the editor. (I'm pretty sure neither GNU readline nor BSD editline do this.) It makes editing prompts a giant pain in the ass.
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