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Patterns

Production-grade architecture patterns reverse-engineered from Claude Code's source. Deep dives into the systems that make agents work.

12 articles

Agent Loop Architecture

How the core two-state machine drives every agent system, from the generator pattern through graceful cancellation, termination strategies, and error recovery.

Tool System Design

How tools are defined, registered, and dispatched in agent systems, covering concurrency partitioning, execution lifecycle, behavioral flags, dynamic tool sets, and the production patterns that make tool dispatch safe at scale.

Prompt Architecture

How the static/dynamic boundary in agent prompts affects cost, latency, and consistency, with the full assembly pipeline, five-level priority chain, memory injection, and production insights for cache management.

Memory and Context

How agent systems manage what the LLM sees, covering compaction pipeline internals, fact extraction subsystem, long-term storage with a closed taxonomy, and production insights for running memory management at scale.

Error Recovery and Resilience

How agent systems handle failure through a tiered escalation ladder, retryability classification, query-source partitioning, and a tool error pipeline that keeps the agent loop running even when individual tools fail.

Safety and Permissions

How a six-source permission cascade, five permission modes, and three resolution handlers keep agents within bounds, with denial tracking, shadow rule detection, and multi-agent permission forwarding.

Streaming and Events

How event-driven streaming delivers agent results as they happen, through typed events, producer-consumer pipelines, priority-based dispatch, capture/bubble phases, and a screen-diffing output model.

Multi-Agent Coordination

Why production multi-agent systems use delegation (not distribution): one coordinator decides what to do, specialist workers decide how. Covers spawning backends, file-based mailbox communication, session reconnection, and production trade-offs.