Claude Code

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

Claude https://claude.ai 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. So, Claude Code is about delegating tasks to an AI agent. It goes further by orchestrating multiple tasks across a set of AI agents that can work in parallel.

A key tip for working with Claude Code is to provide clear context. This means pointing it to relevant files, clearly describing the functionality and features you want, and making sure you extend its capabilities using tools like MCP servers and others in the ecosystem.

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

Claude Code can help with every step of a project

1. Discover	2. Design	3. Build	4. Deploy	5. Support & Scale
Explore codebase and history	Plan project	Implement code	Automate CI/CD	Debug errors
Search documentation	Develop tech specs	Write and execute tests	Configure environments	Large-scale refactor
Onboard & Setup	Define architecture	Create commits and PRs	Manage deployments	Monitor usage & performance

Claude Code tools
A set of built-in tools that help it understand and modify your codebase. For example:

• Bash: Executes shell commands in your environment.
• Write: Creates or overwrites files
• Edit: Makes targeted edits to specific files
• TaskCreate: Creates a new task in the task list
• ... https://code.claude.com/docs/en/tools-reference

Claude Code is extensible

• You can add additional tools by connecting MCP servers, which allow customization for your particular project.

CLAUDE.md

It's essentially a way to give Claude Code a "memory". When Claude Code starts or operates in a directory, it automatically reads any CLAUDE.md file it finds and uses that content as part of its context. This allows you to give Claude standing instructions without having to repeat them in every conversation.

Common uses include:

• Project overview and architecture notes
• Coding conventions and style guidelines
• Commands to run tests, build, or lint the project
• Important context about dependencies or environment setup
• Things Claude should always remember or avoid doing

Three common CLAUDE.md files

• CLAUDE.md

• Generated with /init
• Commit to source control
• Shared with other engineers
• Location: project directory or subdirectories (for folder-specific context)

• CLAUDE.local.md

• Not shared with other engineers. It's typically added to .gitignore
• Contains personal instructions and customizations for Claude
• Location: project directory or subdirectories (for folder-specific context)

• ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md

• Used with all projects on your machine
• Contains instructions that you want Claude to follow on all projects
• Location: .claude folder stored in your home directory

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/L0_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 questions you can ask Claude Code to explore a codebase:

• 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.

• File mentions: let you pull a specific file into the context of your conversation using the @. For example @path/to/file.ts

• Planning mode is a way to ask Claude to think through a task before doing anything — so you can review and approve the approach before any code is written or files are changed.

You can trigger it in different ways:

• By asking Claude to plan first, e.g.: Plan how you would add authentication to this app
• By entering Planning mode before asking any question using the /plan command or the Shift Tab Shift Tab shortcut.