Claude Code was not designed from the ground up to be only an autonomous agent, but it can certainly act as one.
- It has non-interactive CLI functionality (with -p "prompt" option) in addition to the default interactive TUI, making it easy to integrate to workflows.
- It has internal task tracking system that uses ReadTodo/WriteTodo tools to write JSON task lists to `$HOME/.claude/tasks/`, and enabling it to stay on track better than most other tools.
- It has excellent and customisable context compaction.
- And it has flexible permission system that can be used to turn all permissions questions to auto-accept when running in sandboxed environments.
Together those features enable it to be just as autonomous as any GitHub AI bot action hype thing (even though that might not have been its original or primary use).
Yeah, my primary usage pattern for it is purely autonomous for new feature development. I have Claude iterate on a prompt for itself a lot, asking me questions as it goes, then after, I can just say generic things like "Do the thing", "Continue", "Check the repo" and it does the thing, based on R/W Todo and my larger scale todo list for implementation. Also, Claude does have a github action (not that I've tried it though).
Yeah it can. Either using MCP or git via bash. It’s a glaring omission and calls the data into question. How is attribution done? If it’s via the agent taking credit in commit messages, that’s a problem because Claude code, for example, has a config parameter that lets you tell it to not credit itself. With Claude code completely missing I’d say this is wildly inaccurate.
It has fine grained permissions configuration file. And every permission question has three answer options: "yes", "yes and don't ask again", "no". And it has option '--dangerously-skip-permissions'. Out of all 20+ AI code tools I've tried/used, Claude Code has the best permission options.
Actually you can enable everything, or have fine grained control over specifics. Or you just manually approve and ask not to be prompted again. Sounds like you're more of a dabbler.
Yeah sorry you got downvoted, but that's pretty much my inclination is to say RTFM. Honestly though, I'm very excited by how few developers are using the most powerful tools available. Huge opportunity for the rest of us willing to adapt to having our cheese moved, and willing to put in the work.
I do love the reaction to "here's a tool that can do everything when asked correctly" (ie, a compiler for arbitrary human artifacts), and then not read the manual. I remember a dude on this site complaining that 4o-mini only had superficial opinions of analyzing a particular poem, then it turns out the fellow didn't even supply the LLM with the text of the poem. Then the person's argument is that it is like criticizing someone for their hammer being 2.7mm off center. Utterly ridiculous; LLMs are not psychic, they just have approximate knowledge of many things. People seem to love setting them up to fail. My favorite "demonstration" is showing LLMs messing up doing multiplication of large numbers. If only the LLMs had access to some sort of machine that could do multiplication well...