You’ve covered the ideas. Time to do the thing.
No new theory in this lesson — just a run-through where every habit from this level gets used at least once. Open the Claude app. Follow along — actually do each step in the real app, not just read it.
Pick a folder
Anything you have lying around:
- A folder of notes or documents you’ve been meaning to make sense of.
- A spreadsheet or two sitting in a folder — last month’s expenses, a contact list.
- A fresh empty folder with a file or two dropped in, if you’d rather start clean.
In the app, click Open folder and choose it. The file pane fills with that folder’s contents, and you’re looking at the chat box — exactly the setup from Lesson 1.5. You’re in.
Question 1 — orientation
Paste this into the chat:
Watch the turn loop you learned in Lesson 1.4: thinking → looking → answer. Claude reads the files and tells you what it found.
If the answer is thin — that’s expected for a small folder. The point right now is the mechanics, not the depth.
Question 2 — pick something specific
Ask about one file. Something like:
This is reading, not writing — low blast radius, per Lesson 1.7. Watch Claude open the file directly. The file stays where it lives. You don’t copy-paste anything into the chat.
Question 3 — let it want to change something
Now ask for a small change — something that makes Claude touch a file:
This is where you should see the permission prompt from
Lesson 1.6. Read what it’s about to do. Click allow
once. Then look in the file pane — notes.txt is really there now.
You just completed a full agent loop: ask → Claude proposes → you approve → Claude does → you verify.
When you’re done
Look around. The folder is real. The new file is really there. Claude was actually working in your files, not talking about them.
You have officially used Claude Code.
And it doesn’t stop here: later, in It’s not just for code, you’ll point Claude at a folder of your own files — photos, PDFs, a spreadsheet — and watch it build you a small tool on the spot.
The rest of the course — nine more levels — is about learning to use it well: how to read big projects, how to make changes safely, how to handle bigger tasks, how to make Claude yours. None of it works without the foundation you just laid.
What’s next
Level 2: The software world. A short tour of the vocabulary you’ll keep hearing — client and server, API, database, frontend and backend — so the rest of the course doesn’t drown you in jargon.