Comment by ehsanu1

You don't get a simple request/response paradigm with claude code: 1 message from the user results in a loop that usually invokes many inner LLM requests, among other business logic, resulting in some user-visible output and a bunch of less visible stuff (filesystem changes, etc). You control an input to the outer loop: you can only do some limited stuff with hooks to control what happens within the loop. But there's a lot happening inside that loop that you have no say over.

A simple example: can you arbitrarily manipulate the historical context of a given request to the LLM? It's useful to do that sometimes. Another one: can you create a programmatic flow that tries 3 different LLM requests, then uses an LLM judge to contrast and combine into a best final answer? Sure, you could write a prompt that says do that, but that won't yield equivalent results.

These are just examples, the point is you don't get fine control.