Overview
Claude's real superpower for developers is Claude Code — a terminal-native CLI that reads your entire project, runs agentic tasks autonomously, and integrates into your workflow via CLAUDE.md instructions, MEMORY.md persistent context, custom Skills (slash commands), and MCP server connections. Far beyond a chat assistant.
Pricing
✅ When to use
- Full codebase work: Claude Code reads every file and runs tasks autonomously across them
- Agentic workflows: give it a high-level goal, it plans and executes multi-step tasks
- Large document or codebase analysis — 200k token context window
- Complex instruction-following where other models keep going off-script
- Writing that requires consistent tone, nuance, and careful long-form reasoning
❌ When NOT to use
- Real-time web search — use Perplexity or ChatGPT with browsing instead
- Quick one-off code snippets where a chat interface is faster
- When you need a specific custom GPT from the OpenAI ecosystem
💡 Personal Tips
Claude Code is in a different league from chat-based coding assistants. Install it globally (npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code) and run 'claude' inside any project — it indexes your codebase and starts working like a senior dev who has read every file. Three features that make it exceptional: (1) CLAUDE.md — drop this file in your project root with coding conventions, architecture notes, and rules; Claude follows them every session and every team member gets the same context. (2) MEMORY.md — Claude writes its own persistent notes here across sessions, so you never re-explain your stack. (3) Skills — create custom slash commands like /commit or /review-pr for your most repetitive workflows. Pair Claude Code with MCP servers and it can query your database, control a browser, or hit your internal APIs directly. For hard multi-step problems, extended thinking mode is noticeably sharper than any other model available.