Claude Code

Claude Code lives in the terminal rather than an editor: you describe what you want in natural language and the agent reads the codebase, edits files, runs commands and tests, and handles git workflows such as commits and pull requests, checking in for approval before consequential actions. The same agent runs inside IDE integrations, on GitHub by tagging @claude on issues and pull requests, and through an extensible system of MCP servers, hooks, subagents, and plugins that add custom commands and behaviors. Installation is a one-line script on macOS, Linux, and Windows, plus Homebrew and WinGet packages, with the older npm route deprecated; Node.js 18 or newer is required. Using it requires a paid Anthropic subscription or API access, and the client itself is proprietary: the GitHub repository, at about 139,000 stars one of the most-starred developer tools of the 2025 to 2026 period, carries an all-rights-reserved license and serves distribution and issue tracking rather than open source. Documentation lives at code.claude.com.