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.