Understanding How Claude Code Works: A Deep Dive into LLM-Powered Developer Tools
If you're a developer exploring AI coding assistants, you might have encountered Claude Code and wondered how it actually works under the hood. What's the relationship between the command-line tool you install and the large language model that powers it? How does the AI decide when to read your files or run commands? And how do those CLAUDE.md instruction files actually get interpreted? This article will walk you through these questions by clarifying a fundamental distinction that often gets overlooked when people first encounter Claude Code.











