Claude Code
Anthropic's agentic coding CLI — the category benchmark.
About
Claude Code (anthropics/claude-code, ~150k stars) is Anthropic's official agentic coding tool: a terminal CLI plus IDE integrations with subagents, skills (SKILL.md), hooks, MCP support, and plan mode.
It is the tool the whole ecosystem orients around — Amp reads CLAUDE.md, skills collections target it, and competitors benchmark against it. The CLI itself is proprietary; the public repo hosts docs, plugins, and the skills ecosystem. The category-defining coding agent.
What it can do
- Agentic terminal CLI
- Subagents, skills, hooks, MCP
- IDE integrations (VS Code, JetBrains)
- Plan mode for complex tasks
- The ecosystem's reference agent
Setup
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code.- Authenticate with your Anthropic account / API key.
- Run
claudein a project; add CLAUDE.md for project instructions. - Install skills and MCP servers as needed.
Prerequisites
Node.js; Anthropic account with API/plan access.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier). ~150k stars, official Anthropic tool, the category benchmark with the deepest ecosystem. Docked for the proprietary CLI (repo has no license — openness 6.2). Verified tier on adoption, maintenance, and docs.
★ 150,429 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.5/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.2/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 6.2/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 9.0/10
- · 150,429 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers)
- · last push 2d ago; 100 releases/12mo; 14704 open issues
- · manual review: Anthropic's official agentic CLI (~150k stars); subagents/skills/hooks/MCP; the category benchmark; license: NOASSERTION — public repo, CLI itself is proprietary
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.