I Read the Leaked Claude Code Source – Here's What I Found
Today, the source code for Claude Code — Anthropic’s AI-powered CLI tool — leaked online. Naturally, I did what any curious developer would do.
And what I found is genuinely fascinating. This isn’t some weekend hack or a thin wrapper around an API. Claude Code is one of the most sophisticated terminal applications I’ve ever seen — and it’s hiding some wild engineering decisions under the hood.
The leaked source tree. 35 top-level modules, from assistant to voice .
This is not a small project. This is a production-grade agentic system that happens to live in your terminal.
They Built Their Own Terminal UI Framework
The ink/ directory — roughly 50 files — is not the popular npm ink package. Anthropic built their own React-based terminal rendering engine from scratch.