9. Sessions and the Interactive Loop (Steering Claude Code in the Terminal)

In Episode 9 of Beyond Prompting, we enter Part IV of our journey and step directly into the terminal with Claude Code. Author Sho Shimoda breaks down how Claude Code operates as an autonomous CLI agent rather than a passive text generator, working directly inside your repository. In this episode, we cover:

• Getting it Running: Installing Claude Code via the native installer or @anthropic-ai/claude-code, running claude doctor to verify setup, and establishing scoped working directories.
• The Interactive Loop (Gather, Act, Verify): How Claude Code gathers context, executes file or shell actions, and autonomously verifies its work against test suites and diagnostics to close the loop.
• Sessions as Units of Work: Managing persistent transcripts stored on disk under ~/.claude/projects/, resuming past work with claude --continue or --resume, and branching or forking conversation histories using /branch and /fork.
• Steering Over Restarting: Utilizing mid-turn corrections, rewinding checkpoints via /rewind or Esc Esc, compacting context with /compact, and knowing when to use /clear for new subjects.

(Note for listeners: This episode covers Chapter 9 of Sho Shimoda's book RUNNING CLAUDE: The Operator’s Guide to Chat, Cowork and Claude Code, available on Amazon as the successor book to Master Claude: Chat, Cowork and Code).