# Claude Platform Everything [[Anthropic]] gives you to build with [[Claude]], in one place: an API, a web console, docs, a cookbook of examples, and official SDKs. If you're writing software that talks to Claude, this is home base. It lives at platform.claude.com (the address that used to be console.anthropic.com). The name covers a few distinct things people tend to blur together. | Piece | What it is | |---|---| | [[Claude API]] | The RESTful API at `api.anthropic.com`: Messages, Batches, Files, Managed Agents | | [[Claude Console]] | The web UI for keys, billing, usage, workspaces, and the Workbench | | Docs | Guides, references, quickstarts | | Cookbook | Copy-paste recipes and working example code | | SDKs | Official client libraries — Python, TypeScript, Java, Go, C#, Ruby, PHP | ## How it fits together You sign up, land in the [[Claude Console]], and create an API key. That key authenticates your calls to the [[Claude API]]. The docs tell you what's possible; the cookbook shows you code that already works; the SDKs save you from hand-rolling HTTP requests. [[Claude Managed Agents]] is the newest layer on top; managed agent infrastructure running on the same platform. ## The Cookbook The cookbook deserves more attention than it gets. It's a library of working, copy-paste recipes organized by category: tool use, agent patterns, RAG and retrieval, prompting, vision, skills, evals, observability, extended thinking, and even cybersecurity. The recipes worth knowing about: - **Programmatic Tool Calling** — Claude writes code that calls your tools directly instead of round-tripping through the model for each call. Big latency win for multi-tool workflows. - **Tool Search with embeddings** — scale to thousands of tools by letting the model discover them semantically instead of stuffing every schema in context. - **Automatic context compaction** — compress conversation history in long-running agents without losing the thread. The platform-side answer to [[Context Engineering]]. - **Contextual Retrieval** — add context to chunks BEFORE embedding them; one of the highest-impact RAG improvements for the effort. - **Prompt caching, including speculative caching** — cache stable prompt prefixes; speculative caching warms the cache while the user is still typing. - **Batch processing** — 50% cost reduction for anything async. - **Citations** — first-class source citations instead of prompt hacks. - **Multi-agent orchestration** — evaluator-optimizer and orchestrator-workers patterns, plus async agent teams with dynamically spawned subagents. When building anything on the [[Claude API]], check the cookbook FIRST. Odds are good someone already wrote the recipe. ## Direct vs cloud platforms You can reach Claude two ways. Straight through Anthropic gives you direct billing and the latest features first. Going through a cloud provider — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — folds billing and auth into that provider's IAM instead. Pick direct for new projects and full feature access. Pick a cloud platform if you already have a commitment there, or specific compliance needs that make consolidated cloud billing worth it. ## References - Platform home: https://platform.claude.com/ - Docs: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/home - Cookbook: https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/ - API overview: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/overview ## Related - [[Claude]] - [[Claude Console]] - [[Claude API]] - [[Anthropic]] - [[Anthropic SDK]] - [[Anthropic CLI (ant)]] - [[Claude Code]] - [[Claude Managed Agents]]