I Found Claude Code Unpacked: The Best Visual Walkthrough of Claude Code’s Source

Source: Joe Njenga, I Found Claude Code Unpacked: The Best Visual Walkthrough (Medium, 2026-04-06)

Key takeaways

• A visual walkthrough of Claude Code’s source code — makes the internal architecture finally make sense.
• Useful for deep integrations — when you’re building OMC-level tooling that needs to understand Claude Code’s internals.
• Also useful for understanding why features behave the way they do (hooks ordering, tool-call sequencing, context loading).
• Pair with the leaked Claude Code source emails (Email 19 attachment) for deeper-cuts.

Why a visual walkthrough matters

Reading Claude Code’s TypeScript source alone is hard — you need the mental model of how the pieces fit together. A visual walkthrough short-cuts that.

Who should read it

• OMC developers / maintainers — understanding Claude Code’s harness points is load-bearing for the plugin
• Anyone writing hooks — hooks fire at specific lifecycle points; seeing where visually helps design
• Team leads evaluating advanced integrations — when Claude Code should be a library you build against rather than a CLI you use

Who can skip it

• Daily Claude Code users who just want to use it well
• Anyone without a concrete integration project

Complementary reading

• 6 Spins of Leaked Claude Code Source (Email 19 attachment) — source-code analysis producing practical insights
• Anthropic’s Harness Engineering paper (cited in Hightower’s Superpowers article) — two-agent patterns for context-window management
• OMC source — the concrete example of someone building against Claude Code’s harness

Related Playbook pages

• Agent Harness — the conceptual layer the walkthrough makes concrete
• Multi-Model Orchestration — integrations at the harness layer