Claude Code tutorial: a practical guide to AI-assisted coding.

What is Claude Code?

Claude Code is an AI coding tool from Anthropic, the company that built Claude. Unlike a chat window or a VS Code plugin like Microsoft Copilot, it's an agent that lives in your command-line, reads your codebase, writes files on disk, runs commands, and uses git, all from a plain-English instruction. Where ChatGPT and most AI tools answer questions, Claude Code does the work: it's one of the new AI coding agents that takes a multi-step development task from prompt to commit. Anthropic built Claude Code on the same models (Claude Opus 4.6 and the newer 4.8) that power Claude.ai, so it reasons about real codebases instead of toy examples. That's how Claude Code works at a glance, an AI-powered teammate in your terminal.

Prerequisites

You need a few things before getting started: Node.js installed, a terminal (macOS Terminal, or PowerShell and WSL on Windows), git for version control, and a GitHub account if you want to push code. For access, either a Claude.ai subscription or an Anthropic API key. That's the whole list. No heavy IDE setup required.

How to install and set up Claude Code

Installation is one command. Install the CLI with npm: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code. Then open your project directory in the terminal and run claude. The first time, it walks you through auth: sign in with your Claude.ai account or paste an API key, and you're in. From that project directory, Claude Code can read and write the files in the codebase. Setup takes about five minutes.

How Claude Code works

The core loop is simple. You describe what you want in plain English, Claude reads the relevant files, and Claude writes the changes back to disk. It manages its own context, doing file reads as needed instead of making you paste code in. A few concepts are worth knowing. The context window is how much Claude can hold at once; good context management, plus a CLAUDE.md file in your project, keeps it focused on what matters. Claude Code uses tool use to run commands, search, and call external tools and APIs. It keeps conversation history within a session, tracks model context across your files, and can spawn subagents or run parallel sessions for big jobs. Everything runs locally and sandboxed to your project, so it only touches the files on disk you point it at.

How to use Claude Code for real coding tasks

Once it's running, you use Claude Code by asking. Ask Claude to add a feature, fix a bug, or refactor a module, and it plans the steps, edits the files, and runs the tests. Common development workflows: point it at a failing test and say "debug this"; hand it a README and ask it to implement what's described; have it do a first-pass code review on a branch before you merge; or get Claude to write a script you'd never have time to build yourself. It handles multi-step development tasks and the edge cases that come with them, committing through git and pushing to GitHub when you ask. For a non-developer, that means you can describe a report or a dashboard and get working code in software development terms without writing any.

Best practices and common workflows

A few best practices make Claude Code far more effective. Keep a CLAUDE.md in your project directory describing the codebase, the conventions, and how to run things; Claude reads it every session. Describe what you want specifically, because a clear prompt beats a vague one. Work in version control so every change is reviewable. For large codebases, let Claude use subagents and task management to split work into parallel pieces. Treat it like a fast junior developer: give clear instructions, then review the output before you ship.

Is Claude Code easy to learn?

Yes, surprisingly so. If you can describe what you want in plain English, you can use Claude Code on day one. Developers are productive within an hour; non-developers take a little longer to learn the rhythm but are shipping useful work the same week. The fastest way to learn how to use Claude Code well, the context, the CLAUDE.md, the prompts, is on your own projects, and that's exactly the learning curve our in-person training compresses.

Want your team trained on Claude Code?

This tutorial gets you started. Getting a whole team fluent is what we do. Our in-person AI training puts Claude Code, along with Claude Cowork and Design, into your team's hands while they work on your real projects. If you'd rather we build the agents and train your people end to end, that's the 21-day Installation.