Module 00 — Welcome & Mindset
🎯 Goal: Understand the big picture before touching anything. No installing yet. ⏱️ Time: ~20 minutes of reading.
What is Claude Code, really?
Claude Code is an AI assistant that lives in your terminal (a text window on your Mac). You talk to it in plain English, and it can:
- Write small programs for you
- Read and organize your files
- Run those programs and fix them when they break
- Explain everything it's doing, if you ask
Think of it as a very fast, very patient assistant who happens to be an expert programmer, sitting next to you. You describe what you want; it does the typing.
You are not going to learn to code in the traditional sense. You're learning to direct an assistant who codes. Big difference. Much easier.
Wait — what exactly is a terminal?
Great question, because it's the one genuinely new idea here. A terminal is just a plain window where you type instructions to your computer instead of clicking buttons. You type a line, press Enter, and the computer does it and types a response back.
You already tell your computer what to do all day — you just do it with the mouse (click the folder, drag the file, press the button). The terminal is the same thing done with words: instead of double-clicking a folder to open it, you type its name. That's the whole idea. Different input, same computer.
It looks plain and a little old-fashioned — usually a dark window with a blinking cursor — but that plainness is exactly its power: it can do things no point-and-click app can. And here's the reassuring part: you'll barely type commands yourself. Claude Code does the typing for you. You mostly just need to be comfortable having the window open and reading what comes back.
Don't worry about learning the terminal right now — Module 02 walks you through it gently, one tiny step at a time. For this module, just take away one thing: a terminal is just a window where you type — nothing to fear.
Why use the terminal at all? Why not just a nice app?
Fair question. Apps with buttons are easy, but they only do what their buttons allow. The terminal lets you (and Claude Code) do anything — combine tools, process 500 files at once, build custom workflows that no off-the-shelf app offers.
Your company gave you tools with limitations. This removes the limitations. The trade-off is a small learning curve, which this course flattens out.
Analogy: Apps are like a microwave — fast, but only does presets. The terminal is like a full kitchen. Scarier at first, but you can cook anything. Claude Code is the chef who already knows the kitchen.
How all the pieces fit together
You'll install several tools. Here's why each exists, in plain English, so the later modules aren't a mystery:
| Tool | What it is | Kitchen analogy |
|---|---|---|
| Ghostty | The terminal window you type into | Your kitchen counter — the workspace |
| Homebrew | Installs other tools for you | The grocery delivery service |
| VS Code | A program to view and edit files | The recipe book you can read & scribble in |
| Git | Saves snapshots of your work | A "save game" button you can rewind to |
| Python | The language your automations are written in | The language recipes are written in |
| uv | Sets up Python projects & their parts | The prep cook who lays out ingredients |
| Claude Code | The AI that ties it all together | The chef |
You won't learn all of these deeply. For most of them you only need the 5 commands you'll actually use. The cheat sheet has them.
What your day-to-day will look like (a preview)
Once set up, a real task looks like this:
- You export and download a folder of PDFs from one of your work web tools (a CRM, a ticketing system, a document store — whatever your team uses).
- You open Ghostty and type
claude. - You say: "Look at all the PDFs in my Downloads/exports folder. For each one, pull out the client name and the effective date, and put them into a spreadsheet."
- Claude Code writes the program, runs it, shows you the spreadsheet.
- You check it. If something's off, you say so, and it fixes it.
That's the whole game. The modules just get you to the point where step 2 works.
Mindset: the three things that trip people up
"I'm scared I'll break something." You're very unlikely to. Typing commands is safe to explore. The dangerous commands (deleting or overwriting things) are rare, this course flags every one, and Claude Code warns you before it does anything irreversible.
"I don't understand what just happened." You don't have to understand everything. You need to understand enough to continue. When curious, ask Claude Code "explain what that did in simple terms." It's a tutor that never gets tired.
"It gave me an error. I failed." Errors are not failure — they're the normal way computers communicate. Every programmer sees hundreds a day. The skill isn't avoiding errors; it's copying the error to Claude Code and saying "fix this."
✅ You're done with this module when
- You can explain, in one sentence each, what the terminal and Claude Code are.
- You believe (at least a little) that you won't break anything.
- You're ready to find out what your IT department allows.