9.1 — Agent vs chatbot: a posture shift
When you use ChatGPT or Claude in a web interface, you're interacting with a chatbot. You have to feed it all the context -- the code, the files, the architecture -- because it can't fetch information itself. Claude Code is an agent. It has tools: Read, Grep, Glob, Bash, Edit. It explores your codebase, reads your files, runs commands, navigates the git history. This difference radically changes how you should phrase your instructions.
With a chatbot, you give the steps. With an agent, you give the direction. Instead of saying "open file X, find line Y, replace Z with W", you say "date sorting is broken on the orders page, fix it". The agent will find the file, understand the bug, propose the fix. Your en