This document provides a practical guide for end users of Claude Code, covering the essential concepts and workflows needed for daily usage. It explains how to interact with Claude Code, manage sessions, configure permissions, and leverage its agentic capabilities to enhance your coding workflow.
For detailed installation instructions, see Installation & Setup. For configuration details, see Configuration Management. For a comprehensive reference of available commands, see CLI Commands & Interaction Modes.
Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, and helps you code faster by executing routine tasks, explaining complex code, and handling git workflows through natural language commands README.md7-9 It functions as a stateful agent capable of using tools to interact with your local environment.
A session represents a continuous conversation with Claude Code. Each session maintains:
workflowSizeGuideline for dynamic workflows CHANGELOG.md26claude-opus-5 CHANGELOG.md9Sessions are persisted to disk and can be resumed using the /resume command or the --resume flag CHANGELOG.md59 You can view active tasks and subagents, which now support nested spawning up to depth 3 CHANGELOG.md32
Sources: README.md7-9 CHANGELOG.md9 CHANGELOG.md26 CHANGELOG.md32 CHANGELOG.md59
Claude Code supports multiple authentication methods and model providers.
| Authentication Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Claude.ai OAuth | Primary login method for Pro, Team, and Enterprise users. Features an improved OAuth browser page CHANGELOG.md54 |
| Anthropic Console | API billing via console login (using ANTHROPIC_API_KEY). |
| 3rd-party platforms | Support for AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI CHANGELOG.md52 CHANGELOG.md60 |
Use the /model command to switch between models. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is typically the default, while claude-opus-5 is the new default Opus model providing 1M context CHANGELOG.md9 The tool supports organization default models and automatic restoration of "fast mode" for supported models like Opus 5 and Opus 4.8 CHANGELOG.md30
Sources: CHANGELOG.md9 CHANGELOG.md30 CHANGELOG.md52 CHANGELOG.md54 CHANGELOG.md60
The following diagram illustrates how user input flows through Claude Code's core systems, bridging natural language requests to code-level tool executions.
Natural Language to Code Entity Space
Sources: README.md7-9 CHANGELOG.md23 CHANGELOG.md32 CHANGELOG.md61-62
Claude Code executes actions through tools. Tools are governed by a permission system. For safety, certain commands can be restricted or require explicit approval via "ask" or "deny" rules examples/settings/settings-strict.json2-10
| Tool Type | Example | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Filesystem | Read, Edit | Reads and edits code README.md7 |
| Shell | Bash | Executes terminal commands. Can be sandboxed with strict network allowlists CHANGELOG.md10 |
| External | MCP Tool | Integration with Model Context Protocol servers CHANGELOG.md16 |
Sources: README.md7 CHANGELOG.md10 CHANGELOG.md16 examples/settings/settings-strict.json2-10 examples/settings/settings-bash-sandbox.json3-7
This diagram shows how sessions are persisted and resumed from the local filesystem.
Session Persistence to Code Entities
Sources: CHANGELOG.md26 CHANGELOG.md59 examples/settings/README.md5
claude README.md46curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash) README.md23rm CHANGELOG.md61/code-review now runs as a background subagent CHANGELOG.md36Sources: README.md7 README.md23 README.md46 CHANGELOG.md36 CHANGELOG.md47 CHANGELOG.md61
| Command | Purpose |
|---|---|
/model | Switch models for the current session CHANGELOG.md9 |
/resume | Resume a previous session CHANGELOG.md59 |
/mcp | Manage Model Context Protocol server connections CHANGELOG.md16 |
/bug | Report issues directly to the team README.md54 |
/context | View current token usage and compaction status CHANGELOG.md41 |
/code-review | Run an automated code review as a background subagent CHANGELOG.md36 |
/compact | Manually trigger context compaction to save tokens Wiki Table of Contents2 |
Sources: README.md54 CHANGELOG.md9 CHANGELOG.md16 CHANGELOG.md36 CHANGELOG.md41 CHANGELOG.md59
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