Claude Code Unpacked: what the visual guide reveals about the architecture

Claude Code Unpacked: what the visual guide reveals about the architecture A new visual guide to Claude Code's internals just dropped and hit the top of Hacker News. Combined with last week's source code leak, we now have the clearest picture yet of how Claude Code actually works under the hood. Here's what the architecture reveals — and what it means for your workflow. The core loop Claude Code isn't a simple prompt → response system. It's a multi-turn agent loop: User input → Context assembly (CLAUDE.md + conversation history + tool results) → Tool selection (bash, read, write, search, etc.) → Tool execution → Result injection → Next turn decision → [loop until task complete or budget exhausted] Each turn, Claude decides: keep going, ask the user, or stop. This is why it can run 50+ tool calls on a single task. The tool taxonomy From the leak and the visual guide, there are roughly 4 categories of tools: File operations read_file — reads with line numbers, supports ranges write_file