Basics and setup

0:00 You'll gain leverage in areas that you probably didn't even realize that you had, and that's both for software engineering and also other parts of your life. The focus here is not software per se, so you don't need to have a technical background to understand what I'm going to tell you. I'll make sure to start slow and build concepts on each other naturally and gradually so that everybody here is on the same page. So no fluff, here's what you guys are going to learn in this course.

0:25 We're going to start with the basics by downloading and then setting up Claude Code ourselves. I'll then teach you all about integrated development environments or IDEs. There's several on the market, and I'm going to walk you guys through the three most commonly used ones so that we're all on the same page. Afterwards, I'll show you how to set up your project brain, which is also known as the cloud.md file. Once we're done with that, we'll use Claude Code to actually build something because the focus of this whole course is on practical building.

0:50 We'll build a simple web app hosted live on the internet, which I hope you guys learn by doing, not just sitting around and listening to me. After that, we'll cover the cloud directory, the subagents folder, and a bunch of functionality that not a lot of people know about. We'll then cover Claude Codes, various modes, including their plan mode, which you guys might have heard about, dangerously skip permissions mode, which gained a fair amount of notoriety recently, and how to use them, as well as use them safely.

1:14 We'll then cover complex project builds using plan mode and what I just showed you guys. After that, we'll cover context management, which is quite the term right now. I'll teach you guys all about how to manage your context efficiently, avoid context rot, and ensure that your prompts are built and structured in a high ROI way. I'll run you through every slash command and Claude Code and how to use all of them. We'll then cover hooks, which are custom scripts that you guys can fire automatically before or after every Claude Code tool call.

1:40 Very useful to know. I'll then talk about Claude Code skills, which is basically how to create these skill files that turn Claude Code into a bunch of different specialized agents. We'll then cover model context protocol and how to set it up effectively. I'll talk about a handful of automated systems that you guys can quickly build with model context protocol, including email managers. You can build your own bookkeeper and more. I'll cover Claude Code plugins and marketplaces, the Chrome DevTools integration, which is on a connection between Claude Code and Chrome that enables you to collect data from sources that don't have APIs.

2:26 It's very, very valuable to learn. We'll then cover Claude Code subagents with scoped tool access. I'll talk about their new agent team feature and how to use them productively and then get work trees and session mobility, which essentially will allow you to spin up parallel cloud sessions without a lot of the downsides and issues that things like a cloud bot or open cloud have unfortunately resulted in. Finally, we'll cover scaling and deployment. Basically, how to take your automations and run them in production using modal webhooks, GitHub actions and Claude Code on the web.

2:48 So we've got quite a lot to cover. Let's just dive right into it with the first, which is how to set up Claude Code as a total beginner. So the first thing we have to do is we actually have to purchase Claude Code. And the reason why is because they don't offer it for their free plan at zero dollars. In order to have access to Claude Code, you need at least their pro plan for everyday productivity.

3:13 I'd recommend this if you guys are starting out. The money that you spend on a subscription like this is. So small compared to the massive productivity benefits that despite the fact that at 17 dollars, I personally would not even raise an eyebrow. It's no small stretch to say that Claude Code probably delivers me productivity benefits on the order of 10 to 15 thousand dollars a month, because it's not only just skilled as a developer might be, which allows me to build systems that alleviate stresses and strain in my life, but it's much more than a developer as well.

3:40 It's basically my second brain at this point. After you click, try Claude, it'll take you to a page where you have to log in. And once you're done, you can then create your account for the very first time. So I'd select both of these. I'm not going to subscribe to occasional product updates because my email inbox is busy enough. And then you have an onboarding screen with some personal information. So I'm just going to fill that out.

4:01 And then once I'm done, circle back. OK, so I'm Canadian. And unfortunately, our dollars convert quite poorly to freedom dollars. So the 17 dollars that we saw earlier is 28 dollars in my own currency. I'm going to click Get Pro Plan and then walk through the payment details below. Cool. And now I have a Claude subscription. This is all that you need in order to get set up. Everything else is totally free. From here on out, the simplest way to get up and running with Claude code is just opening up a terminal instance.

4:24 That'll seem pretty intimidating to a lot of you. So I'm not just going to show you how to do it in the terminal. I'm also going to show you how to do it using what's called their graphical user interface, which they put together four or five months ago. Any resource that I show you throughout this course is probably going to look a little different by the time that you look at it versus when I'm looking at it.

4:24 And that's because Claude code, Anthropic and just AI tools in general change really quickly, especially since most of the developers are also using Claude code. So it kind of multiplies the productivity here. What's important is not the specific layout, the colors, the words on the screen. What's more important is that you just know how to find it. And so the number one resource that I personally use to look up advanced Claude code features is in the Claude code documentation.

4:50 It's at code dot Claude dot com slash docs, whatever language you speak, just pump in there and then it'll automatically translate that over to. So the Claude code docs specify that in order to install Claude code in your system for the first time, you can run what's called a curl command here. If you're running a Windows PowerShell, you know, you can run this Windows CMD. You can run that just so we're all on the same page here.

5:14 When you have little snippets of text like this, what they're telling you to do is basically to open up a terminal or a command prompt. So on Mac OS, Linux or WSL, which are all different operating systems, in order to open up a terminal, you just type terminal. When you do so, you then get a terminal. Now, this terminal might look a little intimidating to you if it's your first time ever using something like that, but don't worry about it too much.

5:39 I just wanted to show you guys how easy it is to get set up with Claude code in this. And then afterwards, as mentioned, we'll do the graphical user interface stuff. OK, so this is what it looks like on Mac. If you guys are on a Windows, then you'll have to use the Windows key search bar. Then to look up something like CMD or command prompt. At the end of it, you'll get something that looks pretty similar to this.

6:05 From here on out, all we have to do is we have to copy over the command that it gives us. So because we want a native install and I'm in Mac OS, I'm just going to copy over this command. You can also click this little button over here and then alt tap back. I'm going to paste it in and press enter from here on out. A bunch of complicated things are going to occur. If you don't already have it installed, may take you a little bit longer.

6:05 But now we're good to go. Claude code is installed on our computer. Once you're done with all that, all you have to do in order to use Claude is just type the word Claude directly into your terminal. It's really that easy. Now, if it's the very first time that you're logging in, you'll also have to authenticate. And it'll ask you to do so automatically when you open this stuff up. If not, you can also type backslash L-O-G-I-N.

6:28 Once you click this, it'll tell you Claude code can be used with your Claude subscription or build based on API usage through your console account. How would you like to set up? Now, in our case, we're using the cheapest, most effective method, which is the Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise subscription. It's also the most straightforward, which is why it's the one that I used in this course. I'm just going to click Enter. And then it'll then log you into your Claude account, the one that you just set up a moment ago.

6:55 Once we're done, you're all set up for Claude code. You can close this window, then Alt Tab back. And you'll see that it's going to say just press Enter to continue. Now, just so we're all on the same page here, all we've really done so far is we've just opened up a chat interface with an AI model. It's just instead of it being in like a nice desktop application or on the web, it's in our terminal.

7:18 And the value here is instead of running an AI model on the web or in some distant cloud server, what we're doing now is we're running it locally on our computer. So we actually have the ability to take this model and then locally modify files on our computer, write scripts, write stories, write poems, restructure our file organizer, clean up our PC or our Mac. Like this thing is currently connected to my computer. And I'll run you guys through our permissions and all that stuff work later on in the course, as talked about in the outline.

7:39 But even this alone makes it extraordinarily powerful. So this screen can look pretty intimidating for beginners. Most people end up using the terminal flow, not the GUI flow. But I'm going to explain to you what you guys see here just for simplicity. In the top left hand corner, you have that cute little Claude code widget. I think it's I don't know if it's supposed to be a crab or like a jellyfish, but it's adorable. Then you have Claude code and the actual version up above.

8:05 Underneath, you have the model that you're currently using. In my case, I'm using Opus 4.6. Then you have the plan that you're on, in my case, Claude Mac. So this is a couple levels up from the pro plan. And then perhaps most importantly, you have the current working directory. As I mentioned to you a moment ago, this is working inside of your computer in a specific folder. And so Claude code currently lives inside slash users slash Nick Sariah, which is basically like the home folder, at least on my Mac OS.

8:29 Here is your previous command. And so I just wrote clear because I wanted to clear it all the way up and give you guys a fresh canvas. Here is where you actually insert the text. So when you type stuff, it pops up underneath here, it tells you the model again. Then it gives you various modes. So in my mode right now, I'm in bypass permissions. This is sort of like a dangerous mode. It's a mode that not a lot of people feel super comfortable with.

8:51 But it's the mode that I prefer for knowledge, work and intellectually valuable tasks. And I'll run you guys through more of that later on. But you can cycle through modes simply by clicking shift and tab, which I'll show you guys how to do. And then there's some additional information here. There's some version, the latest and then over here is, at least in my case, the token readout. And you know, it's really cool. You can actually adjust this.

9:15 This sort of thing is your Claude code status line, which I'm also going to run you through. You can make it all colorful and all wonky and really fun. You can have it display whatever the heck you want. So the very first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to say, hey, how's it going? And immediately after, I'm going to take a screenshot so I can show you guys some more information. So opening this up in my drawing tool, what ended up happening is immediately after we said, hey, how's it going?

9:39 You see that another prompt showed up called finagling. This is one of like a thousand different words that Claude code uses. Basically, any time it's thinking, it's going to use some funny term like finagling or processing or, I don't know, rumpeting or considering or whatever the heck. They're pretty funny. And the cool thing is you can customize that. Next, you have the number of seconds that your query has lasted. So I just said, hey, how's it going?

10:04 And then two seconds in, it's now produced five tokens for me. And then finally, you also have the token count. So just so we're all on the same page, a token is not the same as a word, but at least for the purposes of most of what you do, you can consider a token to be similar to a word. For instance, I said, hey, how's it going? This is not one, two, three, four. This isn't four tokens.

10:29 It might be four words. It's probably closer to six or seven tokens. But just think about tokens as being analogous to words. Just a few more, if that makes sense. You'll also see that an additional piece of information popped up down here called context. And this is really important. Context goes from zero to 100 percent. And that's how much basically conversation history you have in the current chat window with your current instance of Claude Code. This becomes really important later when you're designing better context management techniques, which is a big portion of what this course is going to be all about, because at least as of the time of this recording, context management is sort of like the big bottleneck in getting these systems to do more and better for you.

10:51 You'll also notice that on the right hand side, my token counter, my status line here, it went up significantly. And so basically what this means is at about 20,000 tokens or so, or about 10 percent of the way through our entire conversation thread that's allotted to us. What's really cool is Claude Code will take all of that history and at regular intervals, it'll actually compress that for you by increasing the information density, taking a string of text and then making it higher information density and higher information density and higher information density successively.

11:39 So that even if you wrote something in kind of like a bloated way, a way that you could have used fewer words to say, as your context goes up and longer, cloud will automatically manage that for you to ensure that you're within the window. So that's how to set up Claude Code in the terminal. Hopefully we're all on the same page. Terminals are really similar to graphical user interfaces, which I'm about to show you in a moment.

12:02 I do recommend that you guys get used to using it in terminal, because when you use it in terminal, you basically unlock even more functionality. You can run a bunch of these side by side. You could run different terminal tools and whatnot that give you guys faster refresh times. And we'll cover that sort of stuff later. But what I want to do now is I want to show you guys how to run it in a graphical user interface.

12:02 And these graphical user interfaces are typically managed by what's called an integrated development environment. Well, that takes us to the next logical question, which is Nick, what is an integrated development environment? An integrated development environment, also termed IDE, is basically three things put together. OK, it's a file folder organizer plus a text editor. Plus an AI chat widget, similar to what you get if you go on chatgpd.com or cloud.ai. So you know how on my Mac, if I go finder, I open up a basically series of folders where I can select different files and open them up and so on and so forth.

12:52 You can do the same thing on Windows. If you just type in folder or I don't know, the C drive or whatnot. Well, an IDE is basically that plus something like notepad or notes plus something like chatgpt all in one. And right now we have two major IDEs that the market is tending towards. The first is called Visual Studio Code, and the second is called Antigravity. Visual Studio Code is sort of like the OG one, because Antigravity is actually built on it.

13:18 It was developed a lot longer by Microsoft. It's really, really extensible. It has great support and it's very straightforward. So I'm going to show you guys how to set things up on it. But Antigravity, I would consider to basically be Visual Studio 2.0. So not only does it have most of the same features now, although it is some of them are still kind of a little beta ish. It's also a lot more modern. And then there's a much bigger focus on AI, which is obviously kind of the whole point of this course.

13:42 So I'm going to be showing you guys initially how to set things up in Visual Studio Code. Then I'm going to do Antigravity.