Claude
Engineering guides and deep dives on Claude — short how-tos and long-form breakdowns.
[ENTRIES: 5]← All_ArticlesHow Claude Code's agentic loop fills your context window
Claude Code runs a gather→act→verify loop while startup load, file reads, and tool output fill context before you hit send — compaction, /clear, and subagents are the official levers for what sticks.
Pick the right Claude tier for agent workflows
Opus 4.8 orchestrates, Haiku 4.5 does the parallel grunt work, Sonnet 4.6 is the default in between. Choose by the job and the token bill, not the benchmark.
Claude Sonnet 5 closes the gap to Opus without the Opus bill
Sonnet 5 ships as the default on Free and Pro with intro API pricing at $2/$10 per million tokens — near Opus 4.8 on agentic benchmarks at roughly 40% of Opus input cost when you keep effort at Medium or below.
Context engineering beats a bigger context window
Claude Code runs up to a 1M-token window on flagship models, but a bigger window doesn't fix a cluttered one — every turn replays the whole history and quality drops before the cap.
Why agents ignore your CLAUDE.md
A bloated CLAUDE.md gets filtered out as noise. Keep it to universal instructions and move everything else behind progressive disclosure.