I’m trying to understand if the value for Claude Code (for example) is purely in Sonnet/Haiku + the tool system prompt, or if there’s more secret sauce - beyond the “sugar” of instruction file inclusion via commands, tools, skills etc.
I think Claude Code's magic is that Anthropic is happy to burn tokens. The loop itself is not all that interesting.
What is interesting is how they manage the context window over a long chat. And I think a fair amount of that is serverside.
This is why I keep coming back to Hacker News. If the above is not a quintessential "hack", then I've never seen one.
Bravo!
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/4f7ffd...
I wish we had a version that was optimized around token/cost efficiency
The summary is
The beauty is in the simplicity: 1. One loop - while (true) 2. One step at a time - stopWhen: stepCountIs(1) 3. One decision - "Did LLM make tool calls? → continue : exit" 4. Message history accumulates tool results automatically 5. LLM sees everything from previous iterations This creates emergent behavior where the LLM can: - Try something - See if it worked - Try again if it failed - Keep iterating until success - All without explicit retry logic!