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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

I am once again (for the third time) [0] asking you to stop using a closed-source harness.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760449

I understand the motivation for such a concern. But Claude Code in particular has its source code available on GitHub [0].

So I am unsure if it is fitting to call it a "closed source" harness.

[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

Edit: The linked repository does not contain source code for Claude Code, the harness, itself. It only contains the source code for (some) scripts, mods and plugins.

It's not open source. It's more "source available", since it's published, but you legally can't do anything with it. Other than maybe build it yourself, for yourself, I guess.

Forgive me if I'm missing something really obvious, we'll blame it on lack of sleep... but is that actually the full source to Claude Code? I'm looking at the repository and I only see source for plugins, mods and scripts. When I get to the readme, it says:

"This repository includes several Claude Code plugins that extend functionality with custom commands and agents. See the plugins directory for detailed documentation on available plugins."

But I'm not a TypeScript guy, so I concede I might be missing something incredibly obvious. I remember there was a leak of the Claude Code source code at one point, and people vibe coding conversions to other languages from the leak, but I don't think the Claude Code harness itself is open source or even source available.

I think you are not missing anything. I have not checked the code itself originally, I am sorry for that. But you are right that there seem to be no actual code for the harness itself. Just the code for (some) mods, plugins and scripts.

I just read the first line in the README file which says:

> Claude Code is an agentic coding tool ...

and I immediately assumed that this is what this repository hosts.

It claims that it includes plugins but that does not mean it does not include anything else. It also never explicitly claims, as far as I can tell, that it does not hold the source code of Claude Code, the harness, itself.

It is all extremely misleading, in my opinion. Which might be on purpose, unfortunately.

That's not the source code. Claude Code is proprietary.

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