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In fact, can someone link me to a disputed comment that the consensus ends up being it's actually AI? I don't think I've seen one.
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For one thing it seems to splitting up the work and making some determination of complexity, then allocating it out to a model based on that complexity to save resources. When I run Claude with Opus 4.5 and run /cost I see tokens for Opus 4.5, but also a lot in Sonnet and Haiku, with the majority of tokens actually being used by Haiku.
Haiku is called often, but not always the way you think. E.g. every time you write something CC invokes Haiku multiple times to generate the 'delightful 1-2 word phrase used to indicate progress to the user' (Doing Stuff, Wizarding, etc)
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This site has gone full Tower of Babel. I've seen at least a thousand "AI comment" callouts on this site in the last month and at this point I'm pretty sure 99% of them are wrong. In fact, can someone link me to a disputed comment that the consensus ends up being it's actually AI? I don't think I've seen one.
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Claude Code didn't exist in January 2025. I think it's a typo and should be 2026.
You’re right. No wonder the date felt odd. iirc Claude code was released around march.
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…
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.
Less true than you think. A lot of the progress in the last year has been tightening agentic prompts/tools and getting out of the way so the model can flex. Subagents/MCP/Skills are all pretty mid, and while there has been some context pruning optimization to avoid carrying tool output along forever, that's mainly a benefit to long running agents and for short tasks you won't notice.
We did just that back then and it worked great, we used it in many projects after that.
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 other advantage Anthropic have is just that they can sell CC subscriptions at lower cost because they own the models. But that's a separate set of questions that don't really relate to technical capabilities.
Anyhow, to follow up on your point, I do find it surprising that Claude Code is still (it seems?) definitively leading the pack in terms of coding agents. I've tried Gemini CLI and Codex and they feel distinctly less good, but I'm surprised we haven't seen too many alternatives from small startups or open source projects rise to the top as well. After all, they can build on all the lessons learned from previous agents (UX, context management, features people like such as Skills etc.). Maybe we will see more of this in 2026.
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Off the top of my head: parallel subagents, hooks, skills, and a much better plan mode. These features enable way better steering than we had last year. Subagents are a huge boon to productivity.
are subagents just tools that are agents themselves?
CC has built in subagents (including at least one not listed) that work very well: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents#built-in-subagent...
this was not the case in the past, I swore off subagents, but they got good at some point
It's a great point and everyone should know it: the core of a coding agent is really simple, it's a loop with tool calling. Having said that, I think if you're going to write an article like this and call it "The Emperor Has No Clothes: How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code", you should at least include a reference to Thorsten Ball's excellent article from wayyy back in April 2025 entitled "How to Build an Age…
Given the stance of the article, just the transcript formats reveals what might be a surprisingly complex system once you dig in.
For Claude Code, beyond the basic user/assistant loop, there's uuid/parentUuid threading for conversation chains, queue-operation records for handling messages sent during tool execution, file-history-snapshots at every file modification, and subagent sidechains (agent-*.jsonl files) when the Task tool spawns parallel workers.
So "200 lines" captures the concept but not the production reality of what is involved. It is particularly notable that Codex has yet to ship queuing, as that product is getting plenty of attention and still highly capable.
I have been building Contextify (https://contextify.sh), a macOS app that monitors Claude Code and Codex CLI transcripts in real-time and provides a CLI and skill called Total Recall to query your entire conversational history across both providers.
I'm about to release a Linux version and would love any feedback.
[1] With the exception of Claude Code Web, which does expose "sessions" or shared transcripts between local and hosted execution environments.