Building Claude Code from Scratch: A Minimal Agent in 393 Lines of C++

An AI coding assistant that reads your files, writes code, and runs shell commands. The core logic? A single while loop. I thought it was bullshit too, until I built one myself. The project is called MoonieCode, and the code lives here: https://github.com/Tenaryo/MoonieCode. Written in C++23, clocking in at 393 lines of source (637 if you count tests). Here's what it looks like in action: $ ./moonie-code -p "list all .cpp files in the project" A few seconds later Claude spits back your...