Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic's terminal-first coding agent. It lives in your shell and is built to be handed long, messy, multi-hour jobs: its Dynamic Workflows feature lets Claude plan the work, spin up hundreds of parallel subagents (capped at 1,000, 16 concurrent) and verify them before reporting back. It runs Anthropic's current models — Opus 5 replaced Opus 4.8 in July 2026 at the same $5/$25 per million tokens, and our August 2026 review tested it on Opus 4.8 (88.6% SWE-bench Verified, 83.4% OSWorld). Thin IDE extensions and CI integration round it out, with MCP support for extensibility. Runs on macOS, Linux and Windows (GA). Pricing rides Claude's Pro plan ($20/month, Claude Code included per claude.com/pricing on September 8, 2026), scaling to Claude Max (from $100/month) or the metered API. Best for: deep, autonomous engineering you want to hand off and audit — large refactors, repo-scale migrations and multi-hour terminal runs.