Understand message flow in Claude Code

Every message you send fires off an API call to Anthropic's large language models. Let's trace out exactly what happens when you send in a message.

Claude Code appends your message to the conversation history. This gives Claude the full context from all previous exchanges, so it always knows what you've been working on.

Claude Code injects its system instructions at the top of every request. These instructions define how Claude interacts with your terminal, which tools it can use, and how it should structure responses.

The system prompts were leaked at some...