And so let me tell you about the phenomenon that is Claude Code. It all started in late 2024
when Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, did a side project that originally called Claude CLI
just to sort of drive coding with Claude in an agent loop and it kind of took off from there.
Anthropic released it generally in April. I think it was available to most people in February
of 25 and it was considered, it was the first time that one of these CLI tools came out there
and really took hold. There are so many of these now but Claude Code was where it began in April
2025 and in September 2025, I mean obviously during 2025, it then took off massively.
September brought V2 which brought this whole robust ecosystem. Many of these features had
been rolled out over the course of the preceding months but they sort of matured in V2. It was
checkpointing, sub-agents, hooks, skills, background tasks. There's also a Claude Code SDK that lets you
write code to use the kind of Claude Code ecosystem. It's not the same as one of the
agent frameworks like OpenAI Agents SDK which is just for building your own agents. The Claude Code
SDK is for working within the Claude Code ecosystem. Now at this time, the best model on the planet
from Anthropic was Claude Sonnet 4.5 which was one of the best models in the world but it was
certainly up there in the top few. It was great but there were certainly rough edges and
in November, Anthropic released Opus 4.5, their strongest model and many people see this as an
inflection point in agentic coding generally. Opus 4.5 changed the game and coming after that,
Gemini 3 Pro, Google's top model seen in the similar camp and Codex 5.2,
GPT 5.2 Codex from OpenAI that we've been working with is also at that tier but Opus was the first
one, Opus 4.5, the first one that had people sitting back and saying something has changed.
We've reached a point where suddenly LLM coding agents are so much more reliable that we can
really trust them to do a lot of code and not be having to check all the diffs and that's a big
deal. At about the same point, Anthropic passed a billion dollars of run rate revenue, ARR,
with Claude Code which was quite a milestone and then as of January, Anthropic released
Cowork which is like taking Claude Code beyond coding. The same idea but now for other things
and of course we won't be covering that in this course because we're all about coding but for sure
you can look at it and at the moment there's a lot of hype around something called OpenClaude
which is like a sort of open source version of it also to be used just generally for co-working
in your life. So lots of other related stuff. Anthropic also investing heavily in labs which is
also looking at more groundbreaking ways to use Claude Code. So tons and tons going on.
There's probably been lots of great big things happening super recently after I record this video
and I'll try and put things in the resources but I do urge you as well to not get too caught up in
the hype. The things that are really powerful and compelling are the things that tend to to live for
a few months and if you get caught up in all of the excitement of the week it can feel overwhelming.
Claude Code has been around for enough time for us to know it's here to stay, it's really powerful
and a big part of this journey as well has been the journey of MCP which is somewhat
aligned with this. It kind of came out in late 2024, it took hold, it's now got 100 million
downloads a month. It's just huge and of course MCP is a big part of the Claude Code ecosystem
as well that we will be covering. Okay the time has come for us to install Claude Code and find
out what all the fuss is about. Now I will say that Claude Code of course the Claude platform
comes with a subscription price. It's another of these $20 a months and it's optional for you.
You cannot pay anything and later today I will show you how to work with free models or very
cheap models through Claude Code but it's not what I recommend. The experience will not be as good as
for people that are willing to pay and I think if there's anything that you want to invest in for
this course I would suggest that an Anthropic subscription might be the thing. Remember again
how much cheaper it is than buying a laptop or something like that and you're getting so much
power and capability but it's a personal choice. You should only do it if you're happy with it
and there are plenty of other ways to do it without paying a penny. So you should you should
choose you go with start free and choose whether or not to use a paid model later if you wish but
let's go and get everything set up right now. Okay so I've gone to a browser and I've gone to
Claude.ai. Claude.ai. Here it is. This is the front door to talk to Anthropics. Claude.
And as with many of these AIs there are two different ways to think about pricing. Two
different products. There is the API for making repeated calls for building your own products.
That's what we used with OpenRuta last week and there's also the consumer subscription
product for a user and in this context we are being a user so that is the kind of plan that
we're thinking about. And there's a pricing menu here that will tell you more about those pricing
plans. There is a free tier for just chatting with Claude like ChatGPT. We're not going to be using
that. There is a pro tier which is $20 a month if billed monthly or local equivalent and this
allows you to access Claude code on the web and in your terminal which is what we're going to do.
And there is also Max which has a $100 a month and a $200 a month plan and I'll have you know
I am spending the $200 a month plan because I'm crazy but I use it all the time. I use it all the
time and I have no doubt whatsoever that I'm getting value from that $200 a month.
Unbelievable value. So I'm not obviously a salesperson for Anthropic but I can tell you I
am a happy customer. Occasionally a very angry customer with Claude but most of the time very
happy customer. Okay so I would certainly suggest that you consider this. As I say you don't need
to. I will give you free alternatives later but for now I'm going to assume that you either already
have or you are now signing up to have a pro subscription. When you do that you would press
try Claude. It will take you through to its screens and you would then sign in you know
with your Google credentials or with email and go through the usual sign up process to have a
Claude account. Then it's time to install Claude Code. So now you go to code.claude.com and that
redirects you to the Claude Code website. Here it is and getting Claude Code installed on your
computer is really very simple. It's just using this one line of code that will appear here that
it will generate the right line of code for your system but or as it says if you want if you want
the proper documentation you click here and this has the details. It knows that I'm on a Mac so
it's showing me this first and foremost. This is the command for Windows. You copy it to your
clipboard like here or there's another Windows approach as well and then you can paste that as
we will in just a second. We're going to take it over. We're going to use the terminal in VS Code.
Why not? And we're going to use that to install Claude Code. So I'm going to copy the Mac OS one
right now and now I'm going to open up VS Code and see you there. So here we are in VS Code. If
you've got other windows open here like various agent chats then close them down. You're going to
file new window if you're not seeing something a bit like this and now I'm going to bring up a
terminal which remember is control and backtick. I think it's also control and J on a PC and command
J on a Mac. Yes it is. Command J on a Mac. Control J on a PC brings up the terminal or control and
the backtick thing there or just a view terminal. Okay and then paste. I'm going to paste in the
command that I copied from elsewhere from Claude's page and I press enter and it's now going to
install Claude Code on my computer. Well it thinks that one through. If you're on a PC and you get a
bunch of permissions errors but you're not authorized to run scripts simply google that or
ask ChatGPT. It will tell you about the absolutely standard instructions you need to run on your PC
so that you have permissions to run scripts like this. Very ordinary thing to do. Okay I ran it,
set it up, it's successfully installed. I'm on version 2.1.29. You may well be on a much more
recent version than that and let me know if there's anything new that you want to have be shown here.
At the very least I will add it to the course resources to make sure there's lots of good
information about tips and tricks from recent versions but the core stuff should all be here.
Everything we're going to cover. We are ready to use Claude Code. We are also going to do something
extra which is install the Claude Code extension for VS Code and I'm going to explain this and
navigate it in just a second but first up please open the extensions window which is view extensions
or it's ctrl shift x on a pc command shift x on a mac and you can see Claude Code is already
installed for me but if you search for Claude Code it should come up as the top extension.
Claude Code for VS Code it's from Anthropic. Tick means it's verified. I have almost 4 million
downloads. You probably have more and you would want to press the install button to install this
extension so that you have the Claude Code extension for VS Code and now this is a little
bit confusing but let me just explain that when you're now in VS Code using Claude Code there are
two different ways that you can do things. One of those ways is going to be to use the extension,
the Claude Code extension and and you do that by pressing the little Claude button that's
appeared up here. You see that right next to the codex button that we had before.
There's too many sidebars. You press that and you get this thing appearing and it's like one of
these sidebar. Let me get rid of the terminal here. This is Claude Code appearing here in a sidebar
but there's a different way to do it which is not to use this sidebar but rather to be in a terminal
and to run it from within the terminal in VS Code and that is what we are going to be doing this
week and you may wonder why. They're very similar, very similar experiences. The one that is using
the sidebar over here is more baked into the platform, into VS Code. It's more built in,
it's a bit more like using something like the codex sidebar as well. It's more of an agent
chat and so it's more sort of it controls VS Code a bit better and so in some ways that's better
but it's a slightly more constrained version of the product. You don't have all the pro features.
It's a little bit more packaged for more of a novice user and we're not novice users anymore.
This is what we would have used last week in week one when we liked sidebars and agent chats like
that but we're pros now. We're going to be vibe engineers by the end of this week so we want to
work directly in the terminal. It's convenient to use this terminal here because then we'll have the
file explorer, we'll have the other VS Code tooling around us and it's aware that it's being used in
VS Code so it still has some control over the other panes but that way we get to use the full
featured Claude code. So again a bit confusing, you can use it as the terminal CLI app within
the VS Code terminal or in the sidebar. We're going to be doing the terminal.