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 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 defined goal, rules and guidelines, plan and execute modes, a chat interface, a model switcher, file access, device access, 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, Claude Code (along with Claude itself) is part of a larger and growing ecosystem. As part of its natural development, Claude Code has outlined an emerging agent platform. There are guidelines like CLAUDE.md that provide the agent with instructions specific to a project or company. Agent Skills help the agent become more capable in different domains. 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 server, and on web. Technical users can talk to it wherever they are: GitHub, IDE, etc. In short, Claude Code is available everywhere work is being done.

If you’re building a product that involves agents in any way, it would be a good idea 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 an even more ambitious direction while improving all of its countless details.