Open sourceTypeScript · ≈154k stars · Proprietary (Anthropic Commercial Terms)
Claude Code
Anthropic's agentic coding tool for the terminal, IDE and GitHub.
Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool. It runs in the terminal, understands a codebase, executes routine tasks, explains code and handles git workflows through natural-language commands, and can also be used from IDEs or by tagging @claude on GitHub. It supports plugins (developed in anthropics/claude-plugins-official) and is installed via a native installer, Homebrew or WinGet; npm installation is deprecated. The GitHub repository hosts docs, plugins and issue tracking; use is governed by Anthropic's Commercial Terms rather than an open-source license.
What the community says
User reports from Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub and reviews, as of Oct 29, 2026. Not our verdict.
Pros people report
- Widely seen as the strongest overall agent with Opus-class models: better taste, more willing to finish the work, strong with skills/hooks/LSPs.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2
- Rich built-in harness features (subagents, skills, hooks, plugins, headless use) that other harnesses can call into.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Flat Max subscription is heavily subsidised versus API pricing, which keeps many users from switching.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Low practical lock-in: users report moving skills and memories between Claude Code and Codex in minutes.Hacker News
Cons people report
- Usage limits and quota changes are a recurring complaint; people hit 5-hour/weekly caps and fall back to Codex or OpenCode.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Heavy context: one measurement found about 33k tokens sent before the prompt versus about 7k for OpenCode; subagents can burn tokens on trivial tasks.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Subscriptions cannot be used with third-party harnesses (OpenClaw ban, regex-style refusals), which hurt trust.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Trust and privacy worries after the March 2026 source leak (undercover mode) and request steganography reports.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Noisy permission prompts and TUI flicker are common UX gripes.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2
- Best for
- Developers on a Claude Max plan who want the most capable, feature-rich agent with frontier Claude models.
- Watch out for
- Quota caps, token-heavy defaults and vendor policy changes; subscription use is limited to Anthropic's own harness.
Adopting an open-source harness? Read the best-practices guide.
People
Engineer
Creator & Head of Claude Code, Anthropic
Claude Code · Skills, plugins & mods
Executive
Product Lead, Claude Code, Anthropic
Claude Code
Engineer, Claude Code
Claude Code
In the news
Open Source · TechCrunch AI · Oct 19, 2026
OpenCode is an open source AI coding agent that's become a popular alternative to Claude Code and Cursor. But hackers got into part of its online platform and stole some users’ API keys, and the AI tools it turned to for help kept refusing to look at the malicious code.
Community · Arena.ai · Sep 16, 2026
Arena.ai's HarnessTax study tests 21 model–harness combinations across Claude Code, Codex CLI and Pi, finding harness choice can significantly change cost even at similar task success rates. Weeks earlier, SWE-bench Pro analysis showed swapping harnesses moved pass@1 more than model upgrades (23%→52% on GLM-5.2) — and that harness rankings barely transfer across models.
Open Source · GitHub · Jul 14, 2026
xAI open-sources Grok Build — a Rust coding agent harness and fullscreen TUI around Grok models — unusually early for a first-party tool. It joins Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI as the fourth major first-party harness, now with a fourth open one.
Neighbours on the workbench
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obra/superpowers
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Maintained by Jesse Vincent (obra)
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mattpocock/skills
Small, composable agent skills for real engineering work.
Maintained by Matt Pocock (AI Hero)
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affaan-m/ECC
Agent harness performance optimization system: skills, instincts, memory and security for coding agents.
Maintained by Affaan Mustafa
Connections
Relations from the Harness Hub knowledge graph, as charted in the State of Harness reports.
Maintained by · 1
- AnthropicOrganisation
Built on it · 203
- 1code (21st)Startup
- 9routerProject
- acpxProject
- Agent Orchestrator (Orchestrator.inc)Project
- Agent OSProject
- Agent Skills (Osmani)Project
and 197 more
Mentioned in · 63
- AI Builders Los Angeles - Dec 16Event · 2026-12-16
- Bogota | Claude Code Impact Lab | Human & AI Flourishing ChallengeEvent · 2026-12-05
- Claude Code PhillyEvent · 2026-12-05
- Claude Code vs. Codex: Loops, Graphs, and HarnessesEvent · 2026-11-28
- Bregenz | Claude Code MeetupEvent · 2026-11-24
- Aizuwakamatsu | Claude Code WorkshopEvent · 2026-11-23
and 57 more
Sources
Verified Oct 29, 2026