Claude Code

Claude Code (Anthropic’s coding-focused CLI/tooling)

https://claude.com https://claude.ai/ https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview

Claude is an AI assistant made by Anthropic (like ChatGPT). You can chat, write, analyze, code, and build interactive tools together.
Claude Code is an Agentic Coding Assistant. A developer tool where Claude works inside your terminal or IDE, autonomously reading and editing your actual codebase, running commands, and completing multi-step coding tasks hands-free.

Resources:

• Claude Code Documentation: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview
• Claude Code Common Workflows: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/common-workflows
• Claude Code Best Practices: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices
• Claude Code Use Cases: https://claude.com/blog/how-anthropic-teams-use-claude-code
• This is a course on Anthropic Academy that you can check out to see more examples with Claude Code:

Claude Code in Action: https://anthropic.skilljar.com/claude-code-in-action

Claude Code installation https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview

The curl method is Anthropic's new preferred way. It's simpler, has no dependencies, and keeps itself up to date. The npm method still works but it'll be deprecated.

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

Course 1

Built in direct partnership with Anthropic and taught by their Head of Technical Education. I think it was released in 2025-08

https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/claude-code-a-highly-agentic-coding-assistant

Reading notes: https://github.com/https-deeplearning-ai/sc-claude-code-files/blob/main/reading_notes/L6_notes.md

The course covers best practices and tips on how to use agentic coding with Claude Code. You'll learn these tips through 3 examples:

• codebase for a RAG chatbot (Lessons 2-6)
• e-commerce data analysis (Lesson 7)
• Figma design mockup (Lesson 8)

Codebase Exploration

https://github.com/https-deeplearning-ai/sc-claude-code-files/blob/main/reading_notes/L2_notes.md

Here are some suggested questions to Claude Code:

• Give me an overview of this codebase
• What are the key data models?
• Explain how the documents are processed
• What is the format of the document expected by the document_processor?
• How are the course chunks loaded to the database?
• Trace the process of handling user's query from frontend to backend
• Draw a diagram that illustrates this flow
• Explain how the text is transformed into chunks? What is the size of each chunk?
• Describe the api endpoints
• How can I run the application?

Claude Code Commands

• Managing Project Memory:

• /init: Claude Code scans your codebase and creates CLAUDE.md file inside your project directory.

• CLAUDE.md guides Claude through your codebase, pointing out important commands, architecture and coding style. It's automatically included in the context each time you launch Claude Code.
• Here's an example of a CLAUDE.md file generated by init for the RAG chatbot example.

• #: Use # to quickly add a memory. Useful when you see Claude Code repeats an error.

• Example 1: since the project is a uv project, we added these to CLAUDE.md file using #:

• # use uv to run python files or add any dependencies

• Example 2: you can inform Claude Code about the database schema, in this case since you have a vector database, you can inform Claude Code about the collections stored in the vector database:

• # The vector database has two collections:

• course_catalog:

• stores course titles for name resolution
• metadata for each course: title, instructor, course_link, lesson_count, lessons_json (list of lessons: lesson_number, lesson_title, lesson_link)

• course_content:

• stores text chunks for semantic search
• metadata for each chunk: course_title, lesson_number, chunk_index

• Managing the Context of Claude Code:

• /clear: clears current conversation history
• /compact: summarizes current conversation history
• ESC: interrupt Claude to redirect or correct it
• ESC ESC: rewind the conversation to an earlier point in time

• You can use regular bash command within Claude Code, but you need to start the command with ! (for example: !pwd).

• You can type exit to quit Claude Code.