What problem does it solve?
Agents need a safe, extensible runtime to autonomously inspect codebases, run shell commands, and edit files without the caller reimplementing complex tool orchestration, streaming, and permissioning logic. The Agent SDK packages Claude's agentic capabilities into a developer-friendly library that handles conversation state, tool invocation, and typed event streams so teams can focus on their product logic instead of agent plumbing.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Autonomous agent sessions: Maintain multi-turn conversations and agentic loops that call tools until tasks complete.
- Built-in tools & streaming: First-class support for bash, text_editor, file_reader, web_search, web_fetch with a typed event stream for reactive UIs.
- Permissions & guardrails: Fine-grained auto-approve rules for shell and file operations to balance autonomy and safety.
- Custom tools: Extend the agent with user-defined tools that include input schemas and async handlers for integration with CI, deploy systems, or test runners.
- Use case examples: Automate code review and refactoring, run test suites and fix failing tests, generate or update documentation, and orchestrate multi-step DevOps tasks.
Quick Start
Create an agent to read package.json and explain the project structure in the current working directory.