Most people first meet Claude Code as a chatbot in a terminal. That mental model is too small.
Ask it to explain a bug and it may answer once. Give it a concrete engineering objective and permission to work, and it can read the repository, trace the code, edit files, run tests, inspect the result, and change course when the evidence contradicts its plan. That repeated cycle is what makes the workflow agentic.
This is the first post in my Agentic Coding with Claude Code series. We will start with the foundations: the loop that drives an agent, the components that make it useful, and the design patterns that determine how much orchestration a task actually needs.