[0:00]This video will teach you Claude Code. I'll go over everything and assume no prior knowledge. I'll walk you through the setup and installation step by step. I'll show you how to utilize the tool, the best practices, multiple features, and by the end of the video, you'll be comfortable using this tool to generate some pretty insane outputs and awesome coding projects. So with that said, let's get into it. So without getting into too many details, Claude Code is effectively a command line or terminal application that allows you to generate code, debug projects, make websites, create applications, whatever it is that you want. It is effectively Anthropic's version of, you know, Cursor or something, right? Where you can generate a bunch of code using the terminal. Now, this is prompt-based coding, which means you don't need to actually write any of the code yourself. You simply type to an AI agent, you tell it what your desired output is, and then it goes ahead and starts coding. Now, often times Claude Code will be used in combination with other developer tools, and I'll show you a few of them in this video. Generally speaking, you do not need to be an expert to use this, and even as a complete beginner, you can create some really cool projects. So with that said, let's look at how we set it up. Now, in order to get Claude Code working, you are going to need a Claude subscription, which is paid. So you're going to need a Pro, Max, Teams, or Enterprise subscription, or an API key with some tokens or credits from the Claude Console. Now, I would suggest that if you're just looking to mess around with this, get the cheapest plan from Claude. You will run out of credits pretty quickly if you are using this for very heavy work, but of course, test it first before you start going and buying a bunch of different credits. It also matters what model you're using, which we'll talk about later, which will determine what the overall price for all of the prompts that you send is going to be. Now, generally, you're not going to be overbilled, you'll just run out of credits, then you would have to buy more, so don't worry about that. Okay, now, to install this is going to require that we work directly inside of the terminal. So what we're going to do is we're going to open up a terminal or a command prompt or a PowerShell instance, depending on the operating system that you're working on. Now, if you are on Windows, then I'm going to suggest that you open up PowerShell. So you can go to the Windows search bar, search for PowerShell, and then open up a terminal like this, and I'll just put it on the right hand side of my screen. Now, if you're on Mac or Linux, then open up a normal terminal, so just type terminal in the spotlight search, and then you'll be in an environment where you can start using Claude Code. Now, in order to install this, I'm going to leave this documentation in the description, which gives you the commands that you can simply copy depending on your operating system. So if you are on Mac or Linux, then you can copy this curl command right here. Just paste it into your terminal and run it. If you are on Windows and you're using PowerShell, as I suggested, then you can copy this IRM command. You can paste it, hit enter, and it should install Claude Code for you. If you're using the command prompt, maybe you're on an older version of Windows, then you can copy this version right here, paste it in the command prompt. Again, it will install the tool. Claude Code is not a desktop application. It actually runs directly inside of your shell or your terminal. So, in order to use this in the future, you will need to open up PowerShell again or terminal again or use this from some kind of tool in order to actually interact with Claude and generate code. Now, once it says it's installed, the way that you can test this is by simply typing Claude in your terminal. So if you type Claude, you should get some kind of output here. Now, when you first run this, it will ask you to authenticate with your Anthropic or Claude account. So just do that. Go into your browser, sign into your account, and then you'll be good to go. Now, also, whenever you run this for the first time and you type that command, it's going to ask you to trust the current folder that you're inside of. So we're going to go ahead and press on yes, I trust the folder, and then it's going to bring up the Claude Code UI. Now, at this point, you should have got Claude Code installed, and just remember, if you were to close the terminal or the PowerShell, you would have to reopen this, right? I'm just going to zoom in, and then again, type Claude, and then you can press enter, and again, you'll get back into that user interface, so don't worry if you lose it. Now, for some of you that are complete beginners, and already this is a little bit intimidating, Anthropic actually did create an easier way to write code using Claude. It is not the same thing as Claude Code, but it is very similar. And you can access that by downloading the desktop app for Claude. So if you do have an account with them, you can just download the desktop app. If you do that, the app will look something like this. From here, what you'll be able to do is switch between this chat and this code mode, and if you go into the coding mode here, you'll be able to select a project. You can write a prompt directly inside of here. You can change the mode like coding, asking, planning, right? You can add different files, you can connect it to GitHub, you can choose your model, and it's a lot simpler and easier to use. So again, if you're a beginner, you can just use this, but if you want to get any serious work done, the CLI or the command line tool, which I'm showing you, is what you're going to want to set up and have on your machine. Now, if you've been programming for a while, you probably know the job market is tough recently, and you may feel like traditional resumes just don't show who you really are as a creator or a technologist. Now, that's where dinq.me comes in. It's a brand new AI native career network built for the real era of real work. Real projects, real impact, not just job titles. Now, instead of a static resume, DINQ gives you a living identity card, your DINQ card, that automatically showcases your code, papers, citations, and measurable impact across platforms like GitHub and Google Scholar. Recruiters, professors, and startups can discover what you've actually done, not just what you wrote on paper. Now, that's what DINQ does for you, but for companies, DINQ is an AI-powered talent engine that analyzes and compares researchers and engineers in seconds. It helps teams spot the best fits faster than traditional recruiting tools. Now, the best part of all of this is that you can claim your DINQ card for free, start building your personal identity in minutes, and let your work speak for itself in a world where resumes get screened for 6 seconds before a decision. Now, here, you can even see my DINQ card right here, has all of my details, information that you wouldn't see on a resume, my whole career trajectory, my GitHub, the number of stars, my YouTube channel, Instagram, all of that stuff is here, as well as networks, career trajectory, Twitter, and anything else that you want to include. Now, you can get started with DINQ today for free by clicking the link in the description, and a massive thanks to them for sponsoring today's video. Let's get back into it. Now, with that in mind, before you just go crazy here with Claude, what I'm going to suggest that you do is install Git on your computer. Now, Git is a tool that's going to allow you to essentially kind of checkpoint what Claude is doing and revert back to a previous version of your codebase, in case it makes any mistakes. You won't have it by default on your machine, so you do need to install it. Now, you can do that by going to the link that I'll put in the description, where you can download this for Windows, Mac, or Linux. However, because we have Claude Code, we actually can just ask Claude Code, can you install Git for me? Now, if you do that, it should actually think about the commands that it's going to need to run to install this for you. It should likely ask you for permission, so you can see here, it's asking for permission to run a command. I'm going to go yes, and don't ask again for winget commands in C:\Users\User, and then it's going to actually run the command to install that tool for you.
[7:09]Okay, so in my case, it actually gave me an error that said that I need to be running PowerShell as an administrator in order to actually run this command. So if you get an error like that, no worries, what you can do is you can just open PowerShell by pressing right-click, and then run as administrator. Now, if you're running this in Mac, it should be good to go by default, but here, what I'm going to do is just type Claude. Okay, I'm going to go yes, I trust this folder, and then same thing, install Git for me, and then let's see if it's able to do it now that I gave it the permissions. All right, so I just got Git installed. I'm not going to go through the whole process, and the next thing that I do recommend that you do is create a GitHub account. The reason why we'll want to make a GitHub account is we're going to connect Claude to GitHub so that it's able to actually create new repositories for us and save all of the code that we're writing from the very beginning so that we don't lose anything. So, GitHub is essentially a website or kind of a remote location where we can store different code. So, rather than just having it on our own computer, we can store it with GitHub, where we can access it from another machine. We can share it with another developer. And more importantly, if we lose access to maybe our own computer, or maybe we delete the folder, or Claude messes up or something, we can always get the repository or the code again by going to this website. So go to GitHub, make an account, it is completely free, and I'm going to just quickly show you how to connect your GitHub account to your terminal here, locally, so that you're able to use it, um, kind of with Claude. All right, so in order to connect Git, which is running on our local computer to GitHub, which is running in the web, what we need to do is run the following command, which is gh auth login. Now, notice that I didn't know how to do this, so I just asked Claude Code, and it told me exactly what to run. So what I'm going to do is type gh auth login like so, and then it should run this command for me and allow me to connect to GitHub here in our terminal. Okay, so you can see that it's going to ask to run the command, so let's go ahead and type on yes. And in this case, gh was not found, so it should go ahead and install that for me. So I'm just going to type option C so it can install that tool for me. Okay, so it looks like it was able to install that, and then I'm going to go yes, so that it can run that command. All right, so notice it's giving me some output here, where it says it wants me to go to this URL and then type in our one-time code. So what we are going to do here is go. We're going to select the accounts. I'm going to go with tech with Tim. And then I'm going to copy this code that it's given me here. So just copy that and paste it, and press continue. And that should then authorize GitHub here in our terminal. Now, in order to do that, I just need to auth with mobile, so let me do that. All right, so it looks like we are all authenticated now. You can see that I was logged in as tech with Tim, and now we have GitHub set up.
[9:41]I know it is a little bit of a pain to do this at the beginning, but trust me, it is absolutely worth it, because now anytime we use Claude, it can automatically save the code for us. A lot of other tutorials don't cover this. That's why you're watching mine because I want to go through it step by step, and I want you to get set up in one single video.
[9:59]Okay, so let me close my browser, let's open up Claude Code a little bit larger, and I want to show you how most developers actually work with Claude Code. Now, rather than just using the terminal here, a lot of times you're going to use this with a development environment. What I mean by that is you're likely going to use an editor like VS Code or Cursor or Jet Brains IDEs or something along those lines. So you can actually see what Claude Code is doing and not just have this terminal view. So for example, a very popular editor is Visual Studio Code. A recent version of that, which is kind of AI enabled, is Cursor. So for example, you could open up Cursor. I'm just going to open up an editor right here. And if you want a recommendation, I would suggest just download Cursor, because this is the best one to use for right now, that also has its own AI features, but we can augment that by just using Claude Code. So you can see that I have, uh, what is it, kind of like a repository set up. Now, when you open up one of these applications, so let's say you download Cursor, or you download VS Code, or you get any code editor on your computer, what you can do is you can go to file, you can go to open folder, you can go to your desktop, or any location that you're going to be able to find in the future. And we can do something like Claude Code Test, and I'm just going to make a new folder. Uh, how do I already have a folder Claude Code Test? Okay, well, that was not what I wanted, so let's go, Claude Code Test 2. All right, so I'm going to make a new folder. The reason I'm making a new folder is this is where I want my coding project to live. I'm going to select that, and then I'm going to open it. So again, I've just opened my code editor. It doesn't matter which one you're using. You can ignore all of the crazy features from Cursor here, and we can close some of these windows, and kind of just hide them. And what we can do is we can open up the terminal directly inside of here. So if you're working inside of Cursor or VS Code or WinSurf, so something that is like a VS Code fork, because a lot of these editors are based on Visual Studio Code. What you can do to open up the terminal is you can try to find kind of like a drag bar at the bottom of the screen. You can see I'm having trouble finding it here. Instead, you can hit control and then back tick on your keyboard, or command and then back tick on your keyboard, and it should open up a terminal directly inside of this folder that you opened for you. Now, if that's difficult for you, you can hit control shift P or command shift P if you're on back, and you can type terminal and then create new terminal, and then just choose one of the instances, so command prompt or PowerShell. If you're on Mac or Linux, again, you'd just choose probably the first one that pops up. So let's say I do that, and you can see it makes a new terminal for me, and I'll be able to see it on my screen. Now, if you want to see the left hand sidebar, which is the file viewer, you can press this button right here. Again, this is in Cursor, but you can do this in another editor as well, and you'll be able to now see all of the files that Claude Code will generate for us in one minute. Now, again, if you can't find this button, you can hit control B or command B on your keyboard, and that will toggle the file view on the left hand side. I know it seems complicated, but most of the time you're going to want to work like this because you want to see the files and actually know what Claude Code is doing. Especially if you're unfamiliar with the terminal, I would highly suggest opening this in some kind of user interface, like we've done here, so you actually know what's going on. Okay, so now we're inside of a terminal. This is the exact same environment I was just showing you before, except it's now in this code editor, right? And again, this code editor is called Cursor. In case anyone is confused, if you just go, you can type Cursor download on the internet and you can download it super easily. Just open it up and literally all you have to do is just go file, open folder, then open a new location, and you can start writing code. So from this terminal, we're going to type Claude. Now, when we type Claude, it's going to open up Claude Code just like it did before, but now in this location. So same thing, I'm going to trust the folder, and now I have Claude Code in my terminal, and I can start getting it to actually generate some stuff. So now we're going to actually start using it. We're going to start building a project, and I'm going to start walking through a lot of the features that it has. Now, I'm going to start going through all of the other configurations and settings, but for now, let's just run this so we can see some kind of output and know that we're actually getting some result.
[14:49]Okay, so you can see that it's going to start doing this and generating some output. Now, something worth noting here is that if you wanted to, you actually could run Claude Code multiple times in parallel. So while I was creating Tic Tac Toe, for example, I could create another game, I could audit the code base, I could, you know, change something, whatever, and that's one of the things that makes this quite powerful.
[15:17]I'm not going to do that right now because again, we're still at the beginner level. Um, but you get the idea. Okay, so you can see that it's generated some code for me here. It's kind of giving it right in the terminal, and it's asking me to allow it to create Tic Tac Toe. Now, what I'm going to do is just go here, and I'm going to go yes, allow all edits during this session. And notice I'm using my arrow keys here to navigate. So I'm going to press enter so that I can just go ahead and start writing this without asking me for permission. Okay, so you can see that it says it has created this for me, and it's telling me that the way that I can run this is to start the Tic Tac Toe.html, or double click the file in the file explorer. So I'm just going to say start Tic Tac Toe.html. Uh, I'm not sure if that's actually the correct command, but let's just run that and see if that's going to do anything for me. It says open it in the default browser. Yes, and don't ask again for start commands. And let's see if it can open this up for me and I can run it.
[16:09]Okay, and you can see this is my browser, and we have Tic Tac Toe, which has now been created, which looks pretty good. We can generate a new game. You get the idea. Now, the one thing that I want to bring your attention to here is that as soon as we started running this, a .claude folder was automatically created for us in the directory where we're working, as well as the code that was generated, right?
[16:32]So you can see Tic Tac Toe now has been written. So this is pretty cool, and this is the reason why you would do this inside of a code editor, so you're able to actually see the changes in the code that's being generated in real time. Again, you don't need to do that, but that's what many people like to do when they're using a tool like this. Okay, so we've got something created, now we need to start going through a lot of the different configuration and setups. Now, keep in mind, if you don't know how to do something, just ask Claude to help you. It can help you, it can change configurations, it can set stuff up for you, but of course, it's useful to know the basics. So even inside of here, as you already saw, you can just type human language, and you will get some output. However, you can also type /help, let's start with that. And this is going to give you a general kind of shortcut or list of commands and things you can do in Claude.
[25:27]So you can see that I can toggle between a few different things here. So Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, or however you pronounce that. Now, you can see the three different models here. So Opus is going to be your most powerful model, and as it says, it's for more complex work. This will be the most expensive, but also just the best, generally speaking. Sonnet is kind of a middle ground model. So if you're doing some tasks that don't have extreme complexity, don't require a bunch of tool calling, you can select this one by just pressing enter, and if you want a faster model that's going to give you quick answers and be significantly less expensive, then you can switch over to Haiku. Cool. So now we've gone back to our first kind of Claude Code instance here, and you can see that it says it's implemented these features in the shooter.html file. So what I'm going to do now is just say run the shooter file. Okay, and I'm just going to have it run this and open it in the browser for me, so I can actually see what it looks like. And then, of course, if we have revisions, so let's go yes, and don't ask for start commands. Uh, oh, it says it cannot find that for some reason. Okay. Uh, let's see if it can run it again. Okay, and sorry, I've got this running now. For some reason, I made a mistake, and you can see we have this kind of retro shooter, which I think looks pretty cool in my opinion. And I can kind of move around. I can shoot. We have like this wave of enemies that's coming. Okay. And that's, I mean, like literally exactly what I asked it to build, which is pretty good, I would say, for a first iteration. So we also have health, right? We have like the menu bar, a bunch of that stuff. We could obviously add add sound effects. Cool. Okay, so let's close that. And if we wanted to make revisions, then same thing, we could just do something like, you know, add power-ups to this app. And then it would go ahead and be able to do that. Now, before we do that, though, I want to talk about Git and GitHub. So if you're going to be working on a large project, I highly recommend that you instruct Claude Code to create a new GitHub repository for this project, and to make clean commit messages, save them locally, and then push them to GitHub, so that we always have a saved version of the project, and it's easy for us to revert back in case we make any changes.
[27:41]So set up a GitHub repository, configure everything, and just use Git and GitHub for the rest of the project. So we're going to tell it that. Let's go ahead and press on enter, and it will just start running all of the commands that's needed to set that up. So you don't really need to do anything here. It should just know what to do. So same thing, we're just going to say yes, and allow this to go, and it will start setting it up. Okay, so it took a second here, but it did work. And actually, if I open up this URL now in my browser, we should be able to see the Git repository that it created. Again, notice, it automatically created it for us. And you can see now we have us, as well as Claude, that are adding commits to this repository. So now it is saved, and all of the work is going to be done automatically with what do you call it? Uh, Git and GitHub. Okay. Now, let's go through a few other things that are worth noting. So I just told it, right? Like, always use Git and GitHub for this project and automatically make the commands. Now, sometimes it will do that just automatically, but the thing with Claude is that as soon as I exit this, so I go like, /exit, right? And if I just go Claude again and I start what's a new session, I've just lost all of the context and the history of what was happening inside of here. So if I ask it like what did you do last or something like that, it can look at the Git history, but it's not going to really know what happened. You can see it says this is the start of our conversation, so I haven't done anything yet, right? Because we started a new session. So that's an important thing to understand about Claude sessions is that you don't have this kind of like unlimited memory like you might have in some other tools. And that's where we are going to get into talking about the Claude MD file. Now, the Claude MD file is something that will allow you to have persistent memory, so Claude kind of knows the rules of your codebase, it knows what it's done before, what it should and what it shouldn't do. And you can set it up to be really complex and advanced so that you don't need to keep instructing it to do the same thing. Because again, if I start working right now, it's not going to automatically commit this to Git and GitHub like I wanted to do. So, in order to create a Claude MD file, what you can do is type the /init command. When you type /init, what it's going to do is automatically create claude.md for you, and in the claude.md, it will actually put in different information based on the analysis that it has of your codebase. You, of course, can modify this claude.md file, and I'll show you how to do that in one second, but this is effectively again, the persistent memory for Claude when it's working in your codebase. And we'll give it a second here to generate that MD file. So let's go yes, go ahead and make that. Uh, so that we'll have that file there and it will always reference it when we create a new session.
[30:16]Okay, so you can see that it is showing me what the claude.md file will look like that it's going to create here, where it goes over like project overview, running the game, development setup, you know, whatever, all of this kind of stuff.
[30:43]So now, if there's some specific things that I always want Claude to do in the project, I can just tell it that. So I'm going to say update the claude.md file to indicate that as you do work, you need to commit things to Git and push them to GitHub regularly, with clean commit messages, so we never lose the status or work that we've done. Okay, so let's go ahead and press on enter here, and you can see I said, you know, claude.md. Whisper actually picked up that this was a file, and it automatically tagged it for me. And now you can see it's making changes, right? And then updating that in claude.md. And if we scroll down here, it explains what it needs to do. So now, if we were to restart this. So let's go slash exit to get out of that. Okay, and go Claude. I'm just going to say what do you know about this project? Okay, and it should be able to look in this claude.md file and give me some information. Okay, and you can see it reads the claude.md file because it knows to go there, and it gets us all of that persistent info. All right, so now that we've gone over that, I want to talk about tasks. Now, if you run the /tasks command, this will show you any background tasks that are running. Now, background tasks are typically going to be things like web servers that are running continuously, and that you don't want to block the execution of your Claude Code instance. So right now, if I want to get out of this, I'm just going to press, uh, escape to get out of that there, and you can see that I've kind of got out of the dialogue. Now, tasks might be something like a web server, a front-end, I don't know, like React website that's running. Whatever. There can be all kinds of background tasks, and by default, Claude will put some of them into the background, but you can also put them in the background yourself. So what I want to show you is if I do something like, you know, run a web server to host my two sites, or host my two games. What's going to happen here is Claude is going to detect that this is a task that would be blocking. Blocking means that if we just ran it in this terminal that it's going to block us being able to do anything else. So you can see that we now see one bash, which means that there is a task that's happening, and it says it's running this in the background. So if we want to see that, we can hit control T, which will show the different tasks. We can go to the bash and hit enter to view it. If we go back, we also can type /tasks, and then it's going to show the tasks that's running and how long it's been running for. Now, from here, if we want to kill this task, so I no longer want the web browser to be running, for example, I can press K, and that's going to kill it for me. And then I can go back just by hitting enter. Okay. And you can see background command was killed, right? Now, for some reason, it's going to go and generate this again, I think. But if I wanted to stop this, then what I could do is press escape. So, for example, if I do something like hello, and then I press escape super fast, you'll see it interrupts that command. So if you want to stop the execution of something in lifetime, press escape. I probably should have mentioned that earlier, but I honestly just forgot. Um, but that's something to know. Okay. So those are tasks. Again, these are things that are kind of like running in the background. That are typically these long-running operations. Now, however, if you do want to create kind of parallel Claude bots that are like writing code or doing different operations for you, where they're touching files or modifying things, that's where we get into agents. So if you go to /agents, you can create agents, and these agents can perform special tasks, and you can delegate tasks to them. So, for example, you could have an agent that is handling doing a styling, right? Or like changing the user interface. An agent responsible for the back ends, okay? I'm not going to get into all the details of how to set this up because it does get a little bit complex and kind of beyond the scope of this tutorial, but I want to show you things like that do exist. Now, we also have things like MCP. If you want to connect to, for example, Notion, or Gmail, or Google Drive, or you want to connect to a bunch of other services, you can do that right from an MCP server inside of Claude, which really expands its capabilities. Again, let's get out of that. Let's go through slash. You can see there's a bunch of other stuff that you can do here. You can set up hooks, for example, that will automatically run code for you or different tasks. You can set up key bindings, memory, you know, all of this kind of stuff. So just go through it, have a look, and another thing that's useful is skills. So you can actually create skills that are essentially repeatable tasks that Claude does all of the time. So, rather than creating an agent, you can create a skill, and then you can run a particular skill by just saying, hey, you know, run this skill that I've taught you how to do. It will go look up the skill and then be able to run it continually. So, you can see how powerful this can get if you really go through the full configuration. But at this point, if you follow along, you know how to use Claude Code better than 99% of people. I showed you all of the core functionality and features, and you can go out and start coding effectively whatever you want, because now you know how to navigate this tool. I know this was long, I know it's a bit complex, but I wanted you to get the proper setup so you didn't need to watch a bunch of other videos. If you guys have other questions or you want more tutorials on Claude Code, then definitely let me know, and I will see you in another video.
