Claude Code, your bearings

1.01

What Claude Code is

Claude Code is Claude with its hands on your computer.

It is the same Claude you already talk to, and instead of answering inside a window that cannot touch anything, it can open the things on your machine and change them.

It reads
It writes
It runs things

Nothing on this course involves writing software.

Claude Code was built for programmers, and it turns out to be the best way there is to have Claude do knowledge work, because your work lives in files and now so does it.

You will not see a line of code from me.

What it can do

What that looks like

It reads

Anything in the folder. A document, a spreadsheet you exported, a note you dictated last week. It opens the file and works from what is in it, not from what you remembered to mention.

It writes

It creates files and edits the ones already there, and a file it wrote today is a file it can read next week.

It runs things

The small mechanical jobs a computer can do, renaming a hundred files, pulling a list out of a spreadsheet, tidying a folder. You will use this less than the other two.

The folder you open it in is its world.

It sees what is inside that folder and nothing outside it, so today that folder is empty, and it fills up as we go.

You work in it through VS Code, and that window is home from here on.

The Claude app on your phone and the chat in your browser are still there for a question on the move, but anything you want kept goes through this window and into the folder, so there is one place that knows your work.