What it is
Claude Code is an agent built on Anthropic's Claude models. You describe a task, and it reads files, searches the codebase, edits code and runs commands, while you steer and review the work. It runs in the terminal on macOS, Linux and Windows, in VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, in a desktop app, on the web, on iOS and Android, in GitHub and in Slack, and it can group related sessions into projects.
It is not part of the free Claude plan. It is included in Claude Pro ($17 a month billed annually, $20 monthly) and in the Max plans ($100 or $200 a month), which give more usage. Usage limits apply on every plan, so long sessions in large codebases suit Max better than Pro.
Best for
- Handing off bug fixes, tests and multi-step migrations
- Developers who like to work in the terminal
- Running and supervising several coding sessions at once