The emerging agent platform

If 2025 was the year of agents, it was also the year of Claude Code. As the first breakthrough coding agent, Claude Code completely took over the AI-assisted coding space. It conclusively proved the viability of an agent-centric approach for solving real world software engineering problems. What Anthropic, the maker of Claude Code, also found was that its coding agent turned out to be a pretty good general-purpose agent, so they renamed the Claude Code SDK to the Claude Agent SDK.

Besides becoming the current market leader, Claude Code also managed to accomplish something more important: it set the standard of what an “agent” product looks like. Many thought leaders argued endlessly in 2025 about what an agent is, but the definition is a lot clearer now: an agent looks like Claude Code. That is to say, an agent has a chat interface, a model switcher, access to files, access to a computer, plan and execute modes, rules and guidelines, and an extension system. Not all agents will look exactly like this, but this definition rules out all of the basic chatbots and workflow builders that have tried to pass themselves off as “agents.”

Beyond the coding agent itself, Claude Code (along with Claude itself) is part of a larger and growing ecosystem. There’s an emerging agent platform that Claude Code has outlined simply as part of its natural development. There are standards like CLAUDE.md (and its open counterpart AGENTS.md) that help guide the agent with project-specific and company-specific instructions. Agent Skills help the agent become more capable. Integrations with other tools are handled by MCP. Claude also hooks into daily drivers like Slack, Chrome, and Office. It’s multi-platform as well - on desktop, on mobile, on servers, and on web. Technical users can talk to it on GitHub and in their IDEs. In short, Claude Code is everywhere because it can be used everywhere.

If you’re building a product that involves agents in any way, it would be smart to look at Claude Code and its platform as a template. Implementing something like it is a substantial undertaking. It might be simpler to just repurpose it for your own use. That said, the opportunity is there to guide the emerging agent platform towards a more vendor-neutral direction and improve all of its infinite details.