Frequently Asked Question

What is Claude Code?

Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool. You run it in a terminal, describe a goal in ordinary prose, and it reads your files, runs shell commands, edits code, and reports back, looping until the task is done or it needs a decision from you.

From the operating system's point of view it is unremarkable: a program that spawns child processes, running as your user, with your permissions, in your working directory. Everything Chapter 9 said about permissions and Chapter 10 said about processes applies to it unchanged. That is the source of both its usefulness and its risk.

It runs on Ubuntu 20.04 and later, Debian 10 and later, and Alpine 3.19 and later, on x64 or ARM64, and it needs a network connection because the model itself runs remotely. There are also VS Code and JetBrains integrations, a desktop application, and a web version, all sharing the same configuration files.