In Part 1, I treated Claude Code as a bounded loop: perceive, reason, act, then feed the evidence back in. The reasoning engine is only as good as the working set it sees. A precise goal still fails if the window is full of directory trees, stale chat, and a vague tool contract.

This is Part 2 of 6 in my Agentic Coding with Claude Code series. The working model I am keeping is simple: context is assembled, not typed, and it is a budget, not a bucket.

CLAUDE.md, path-scoped rules, skills, memory, tool results, and the conversation all compete for the same tokens. Unfiltered tool output is paid for on every later turn. The job is to load the right slice at the right time.

Later posts will cover the harness and Agent SDK, MCP, evals, and guardrails. This one stays on the context layer that shapes every decision in the loop.

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Claude Code is the interactive experience. The Claude Agent SDK is the programmable interface to the same agent loop, tools, and context management.

That distinction changes what we can build. Instead of opening a terminal and guiding one task by hand, we can place the agent inside a product, internal service, CI job, or document pipeline. Our application defines the goal and operational boundary. Claude decides which permitted actions to take, observes the results, and continues until the task is complete.

This is Part 2 of my Agentic Coding with Claude Code series. We will move from the concepts in Part 1 to the SDK primitives that make an agent work: query(), message streams, sessions, tools, and permissions.

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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 Part 1 of 6 in my Agentic Coding with Claude Code series. The working model I am keeping is simple: Claude Code is a bounded loop of perceive, reason, act, and feedback, not a longer chatbot reply.

Later posts will cover context, the harness / Agent SDK / stop-reason loop, MCP, evals, and guardrails. This one stays on the loop, the components, and the patterns.

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