Part 2 ended with a debt: when I own the runtime, I have to implement trim, a facts block, tiered compress, and placement myself. Claude Code already does a version of that. A product I ship does not get it for free.
This is Part 3 of 6 in my Agentic Coding with Claude Code series. The working model I am keeping is simple: the model reasons, the harness decides what happens next.
Claude Code is one harness. The Agent SDK is that same loop as a library. The Messages API is the loop with the cover off: every response has a stop_reason, and your code chooses whether to run a tool, ask the user, route, escalate, or halt.
Later posts will cover MCP, evals, and guardrails. This one stays on the runtime around the model.