Claude Code Roadmap for Developers

Phase 1 — Foundation

🧠 Understand Claude

How LLMs work Claude vs GPT vs Gemini Context window Token & pricing Opus / Sonnet / Haiku Claude.ai vs API

Phase 2 — Prompting

✍️ Prompt Engineering

System prompt Role & persona Few-shot examples Chain of thought XML tags Output format control Temperature & top_p Prompt caching

Phase 3 — API Integration

⚡ Anthropic API

SDK (Python / JS) Messages API Streaming Batch API Vision / Multimodal PDF & documents Rate limits Error handling

Phase 4 — Tools & Agents

🔧 Tool Use & Agents

Tool / Function calling Tool schemas (JSON) Multi-tool orchestration Agentic loop Computer use Web search tool Human-in-the-loop

Phase 5 — Claude Code

💻 Claude Code CLI

Commands

/help
/plan
/clear
/compact
/memory
/cost
/doctor

CLAUDE.md Skills Subagents Hooks MCP integration Slash commands Permission modes Plan mode Headless mode Git worktrees

Shortcuts

Ctrl+C
Ctrl+R
Shift+Tab
Esc + Esc
@ mention
\ multiline

Phase 6 — MCP

🔌 Model Context Protocol

MCP architecture MCP servers MCP clients Build custom MCP MCP + Claude Code Stdio vs SSE transport Auth & security

Phase 7 — Advanced

🚀 Production & Scale

Agent Teams Multi-agent orchestration Evals & testing Fine-tuning strategy Cost optimization Security best practices Observability & logging CI/CD integration

Core / Claude Code

Prompting / MCP

API

Tools & Agents

Production