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15 min read

Agent Development Kit — 5 Layers of Claude Code

Five composable layers of Claude Code as a runtime — CLAUDE.md, Skills, Hooks, Subagents, Plugins — plus MCP and Agent Teams.

  • claude-code
  • reference-architecture
  • agentic-ai

Claude Code is more than a CLI — it is an emerging runtime for agentic software. We map the five layers (CLAUDE.md, Skills, Hooks, Subagents, Plugins) plus the two extensions (MCP and Agent Teams) into one reference architecture, and show how each layer composes with the others. Use it as a checklist for your own setup and to decide where new functionality belongs.

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