From your terminal to your pipelines
Once Claude Code can run via -p with --allowedTools and --output-format json, it stops being a human-only tool and becomes a pipeline primitive. The same model that helps you write code now reviews PRs in CI, generates release notes nightly, and triages errors before a human reads them.
The patterns: TDD loops (ask for failing tests first, then implement, then refactor — Claude excels at red/green/refactor), diff review (git diff main...HEAD | claude -p in a CI step), JSON for downstream (parse Claude's structured output with jq, gate the pipeline on findings), least-privilege automation (--allowedTools gives Claude exactly what the job needs and nothing else).
Anthropic ships an official GitHub Action — anthropics/claude-code-action@v1 — for the common case (@claude mentions in PRs trigger an agent run). For everything else, you orchestrate the same primitives yourself.