wtf is claude-code-rev?

This repo is a reverse-engineered reconstruction of Claude Code, Anthropic's command-line coding assistant. It lets you look at and run a version of the tool that normally ships as a compiled, closed-source package. Think of it as someone taking a finished app and working backwards to recover something close to the original source code behind it. The reconstruction was done using "source maps," which are files that shipped with the original tool and contain partial information about how it was built. Source maps are like a map with some streets missing, so the person doing this had to fill in gaps where files were lost entirely. Where they couldn't recover the original code, they wrote compatibility shims or simplified replacements so the whole thing still installs and runs. The result is a workspace that boots up, shows the full command tree, and behaves like Claude Code, though some features don't work exactly the way the original did. This would appeal to developers and tinkerers who want to understand how Claude Code is structured internally. Maybe you're curious about how an AI coding assistant organizes its prompts, tool catalogs, and permission flows. Or you want to study the architecture before building something similar. It's essentially a learning resource rather than something you'd use for real work, since several modules still have degraded behavior where the original code couldn't be recovered. The notable tradeoff is honesty about limitations. The README is upfront that this isn't a faithful reproduction. Private integrations, native bindings, and type-only files are largely missing or stubbed out. The parts that were recovered, like the CLI bootstrap path and some bundled skill documentation, are real and usable, but you should expect rough edges in areas that depended on unrecoverable internal code. You'll need Bun 1.3.5 and Node.js 24 installed to run it locally.