Introduction

I’ve been diving into Claude Code recently—an AI coding assistant that feels genuinely practical instead of just cool on paper. If you’re thinking about building your own agentic systems, there’s some clever stuff here worth exploring. Claude Code nails three important things that many tools overlook: snappy real-time feedback, clear safety guardrails, and a plugin design that’s actually easy to extend. This guide breaks down how anon-kode, a fork of Claude Code, tackles these ideas, along with some thoughts on the engineering choices they made along the way.

For advanced users wanting to build their own Claude Code, this is a deep guide into how the command loop, execution flows, tools, and commands all come together in a way that is, as far as I know, unique to Claude Code, Anon Kode, and my coding agent.

Let’s dig in.

First off, here's a little bit of how Claude introduces this code review:

Claude Code combines a terminal UI with an LLM, making AI-assisted coding smoother and genuinely usable. If you’re thinking about building your own, Claude Code stands out by handling three tricky issues better than most:

  1. Instant results: Uses async generators to stream output immediately, avoiding laggy interactions.
  2. Safe defaults: Has clear, structured permissions to prevent accidental file or system modifications.
  3. Simple extensibility: Plugin architecture is clean, consistent, and easy to build on.

Let's dig into how anon-kode (a fork of Claude Code) approaches these problems with a React terminal UI, structured tool system, and careful parallel execution.

This was written and reviewed by humans and AI. While even on manual review it generally is accurate and is architecturally similar to my coding agent, coder, errors may be present. Feel free to open a pull request!