Claude Code, right now in research beta, is an Agentic coding assistant addressing the CLI Warriors. It is well worth knowing about.

Claude Code has a few different purposes as a CLI assistant. For instance you can ask it to "find the biggest file in the directory", or "commit changes and push them to Github", but the most useful usage is for working with your codebase by unleashing its Agents which enable:

• Editing files and fixing bugs across your codebase
  
  
• Codebase Q&A
  Answering questions about your code’s architecture and logic
  
  
• Unit and Integration Tests
  Executing and fixing tests, linting, and other commands
  
  
• Debugging
  Analyzing stacktraces and errors to provide debugging directions
  
  
• Code Generation
  Generating code for new features or fixing bugs.

All these at the tips of your fingertips. By integrating directly with your development environment, Claude Code streamlines your workflow without requiring additional servers or complex setup.

But what stands out is the feeding of your whole codebase to it. In "Tools To Share Your Codebase With LLMs"
we looked at Gitingest and Repomix, two tools that render a codebase suitable for LLM ingestion. That is, when wanting to share code with a LLM for asking it to do some work on it, developers face three issues:

• they run out of tokens since code fills up the context window quickly
  
  
• the format of the source files might not be uniform
  
  
• copying and pasting individual files rather than a whole code base doesn't reflect the structure and notion of the codebase

These tools turn any Git repository into a simple text digest of its codebase. Which means that you still have upload the resulting artifact to Claude web/desktop or otherwise. With Claude Code, there's no need for that anymore, as it has access to your whole codebase on your local system.

At this point it's interesting to note that instead of integrating the solution into an IDE like VScode does with Copilot, Anthropic chose to go purely CLI. In many cases this is more convenient.

Interesting note number 2. Last year in Claude Engineer Amplifies Your Code we looked at maybe the predecessor of Claude Code, Claude Engineer, a CLI tool that, although not affiliated with Anthropic but made by the founder of EverArtAI Pietro Schirano, draws on Anthropic's Sonnet 3.5 model to add super power capabilities to your coding workflow.

The functionality is similar: In simple terms it is a tool that assists with a wide range of software development tasks like file system operations, web search and intelligent code analysis all from within the CLI fostering a chatbot interface. Example interactions with the bot include:

• Create a new Python project structure for a web application
• Explain the code in file.py and suggest improvements
• Search for the latest best practices in React development
• Help me debug this error: [paste your error message]
• Analyze this image and describe its contents
• Execute this Python code and analyze the results
• Read multiple files: file1.py, file2.py, file3.py

While Engineer draws on Sonnet 3.5, Code draw on the more advanced Sonnet 3.7. Be careful; in either case while the tools are free to install and use, the underlying LLM is not, and charges apply as you go using it.

To install, Code requires at least Node.js 18 , summonable from npm :

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

Then:

Navigate to your project

cd your-project-directory

Start Claude Code

Run "claude" to launch

Complete authentication
Follow the one-time OAuth process with your Console account. You’ll need active billing at console.anthropic.com.

To conclude, Claude code offers a more practical and straightforward alternative to the various Agentic powered IDEs out there. As said, it's still in research beta and a lot of things need polishing. But upon completion, it's going to be a powerful proposition. 

More Information

Claude Code overview 

Related Articles

Tools To Share Your Codebase With LLMs

Claude Engineer Amplifies Your Code  

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