Tech Bright Tips

If you're building AI agents and you haven't studied this architecture, you're building blind.

New post breaks it all down ↗️

When you use Claude Code, you think you're talking to a model.

You're not.

You're talking to a 46K-line query engine that decides what the model sees, what tools it can touch, and when to stop.

Here's what happens when you type "fix this bug" 👇

Layer 1 → CLAUDE.md
Before reading your code, Claude reads this file. Your architecture. Your conventions. Your guardrails. Without it, Claude guesses. With it, Claude follows your playbook.

Layer 2 → The Agent Loop
Not a single API call. A loop: Gather Context → Take Action → Verify → Repeat. A bug fix might cycle dozens of times.

Layer 3 → 50+ Tools
Without tools, Claude only responds with text. With tools, it acts. File ops, Bash, Grep, Web fetch, and AgentTool — sub-agents as first-class citizens of the same registry.

Layer 4 → Permissions
Every tool call hits a 4-step cascade: Rules → Tool logic → Mode check → Classifier → User prompt. Fail-open means "ask the user," not "execute anyway."

Layer 5 → Skills + Hooks + MCP
Skills shape behavior. Hooks fire at lifecycle moments. MCP connects external services. All same interface. MCP hit 97M installs because of this.

The big insight?

You were never talking to a model. You were talking to a 46K-line query engine, a 5-layer compaction system, and an 8-layer security model.

The era of "just call the API" is over.

Save this for later 🔖

RAG has three generations. Most teams are still on the first one. 🧠

Classic RAG → Retrieves
Fast, simple, single-hop. Perfect for FAQs and policy lookups.

Graph RAG → Connects
Entity-rich and relational. Shines when the answer lives *between* documents, not inside them.

Agentic RAG → Reasons
Adaptive, multi-step, self-correcting. The agent chooses its own tools and checks its own work.

The upgrade path isn’t about complexity for its own sake — it’s about matching retrieval to the shape of the question.

Classic RAG handles “what.” Graph RAG handles “how are these related.” Agentic RAG handles “figure it out.”

Save this for your next architecture review. 📌

Which generation is your team building on right now? 👇