How to Get Started With Claude Code, Even If You Can't Code

A Google principal engineer tweeted something last month that broke the internet. She said she gave Claude Code a description of a distributed systems problem that her team at Google had spent a year building a solution for. Claude Code reproduced their work in an hour. Now, I've been in the software industry for over a decade. I was chief product architect at Dayforce, a $1.8 billion revenue company. Before that, I had started my own crypto startup. Before that, I was leading product architecture at Workday, helping them grow from $2 billion to over $4.5 billion. $1 billion with patented product analytics work. I've seen a lot of tools come and go. I've seen a lot of products get created. I've seen dumpster fires. I've seen rocket ships. Claude Code is different, and it's not for the reason most people think. It's not at all about the code part. It's about who gets to build. Boris, the creator of Claude Code, hasn't manually written code in months. The creator of Claude Code. He runs many agents at once. Developers call it the StarCraft workflow. But here's the really interesting thing. It's that the fastest growing segment of Cloud Code users are not developers. It's actually non-technical people. Lawyers building internal tools to make their lives easier. Marketers automating their campaigns, automating creative creation. Founders such as me and you shipping features. I've been building my AI startup as a bootstrapped founder with Cloud Code for a while now, and features that would've taken my team months in the past, traditionally, we ship them in days. And so if you're not on Cloud Code, you have to be getting on Cloud Code. There is a significant advantage and arbitrage to being on the front lines using these tools, and in particular, I've used a lot of AI tools. Cloud Code is the way. Today I'm gonna show you exactly how to get started. So let me walk you through the setup. This takes less than 5 minutes. Anybody can make time for this. You need 3 things. One, a terminal. If you're on a Mac, search for Terminal in your app, or on Windows, Command Prompt or PowerShell. If those words mean nothing, just search your computer for Terminal and open the first result. Number 2, a Claude Pro subscription. This is $20 a month at Claude.ai. Go get one if you don't have it. I'll be waiting. Number 3, Node.js. Go to Node.js.org. There is a big green button. Install it. You don't have to read the documentation too closely. Just install for now. Let's move forward. And in your terminal, type this. There is a command right here that'll pop up and a link to a newsletter I've written with this exact walk through a tutorial and you can copy paste all these commands. Wait about 30 seconds after copy pasting this command in and hitting enter. You'll be done. Now that you've gotten Claude Code installed, type this command: cd Documents and then type Claude. It'll ask you to log in. Follow the prompts and use the account that you registered with in the previous step. Now you're in. That's it. You're running Cloud Code. Boom. Amazing. Now, before we really build anything, let's reframe something. A lot of people think AI and maybe Cloud Code as a chatbot that just happens to touch a lot of files. I've used a lot of AI tools. Cloud Code, think of it as a teammate. That's your framing. It's a teammate who sees the context, your files, your projects, your folders, your media files, whatever. It sees that context, just another teammate might. It understands them. It runs commands or autonomously, and it makes changes. And here's the key. It makes changes only with your permission. So it's gonna ask you for permission each time you go through different steps. In the future, there'll be faster ways to get through this. For now, it's good, especially if you're just getting started using Cloud Code, to approve or reject all the different steps when it's creating files and such. So one of the key things to reframe on is understanding that Cloud Code is like a teammate that has the right context. To then do its job autonomously, just like your human teammates, you need to learn, and you learn this in leadership, to describe what you want clearly enough so that such a smart teammate could build the thing you want and drive the outcome you want. That's the question here, is can you communicate what you want, the outcome you want, or what you want designed or built, the piece of content you want? Can you communicate that? With specificity. So it's not a question of do I know Python well or can I code? That's not the question. It is can you communicate what you want with specificity? So now let's try it yourself. Build a simple web page. I've included a prompt here. Create a simple web page that says hello, I'm insert your name here with a clean modern design. And when I put this in, this is the output that I got. Claude was thinking, it created files, it asked me for permission, it showed me what it did. And then I can modify, say yes, no, and then you end up getting this clean webpage. Took a minute, maybe, but that's like a toy example. The workflow though is the same. You talk to it in plain English and it will give you something back. That's how these LLM applications work. So now let me show you a feature that makes this safer for your workflows before you let Claude Code just run wild on your file system. Press Shift+Tab. A couple times. You should now see plan mode. Pro tip: use plan mode. Here's what it does. Claude Code analyzes your project, the context, whatever files, directory it's in, makes a plan based on the plain English you communicated to it, and it checks in with the plan like a human teammate checks in with a plan after you give it instructions or them instructions. And then you get to look at the plan, the blueprint of what Claude Code is going to do. And you could adjust the plan in plain English. It'll iterate the plan with you. So now try something. I want to add a contact form where visitors can enter their name and email. Show me your plan first. Go ahead and write that in after activating plan mode. And now look at this. It's telling me exactly what it intends to do, what files it will create, what code it'll add, why. You don't have to understand every line. Don't be overwhelmed. Just look for a few things. Does the description match what I asked for? Is it creating a reasonable number of files? This is a simple webpage, so is it creating 1 or 2 files, not 4,750? Does the explanation make sense to me in plain English in the plan? If it looks right, I tell it to proceed. If something's off, I say what feels off or how to change it. And I try to be specific. Again, it's all about communicating what you want with specificity. So that's the loop. Describe it, review, plan, adjust, approve, see results. And now you're off and running on Cloud Code. So just to be clear, from here, now, if you came in knowing nothing, now you've gotten up and running on Cloud Code, even if you were not technical, and you built a little webpage, you see the power of it. There's many other things you could do from here. The key thing though is framing, communicating specifically what you want. Your first 10, 20, 30, 50 prompts might not be that good. Keep trying. Pro tip: use voice-to-text. Talk to Claude Code and you will get better at communicating with specificity what you want out of the tool. And that's the key is you're not gonna have the first perfect prompt right away, maybe the first 50 times, 100 times. But as you learn to use these tools more, Claude Code more, your prompts will get better and better and you'll be able to better direct your agent teammate. So there's a big difference between, for example, add a testimonial section versus add a testimonial section with 3 cards, each showing a quote, the person's name, and their company. Use the same styling as the rest of the page. These will bring wildly different results. Again, the outcome will be a function of the communication and specificity. The founders who get scary good at this are not gonna be the ones who learn the technical jargon or have super technical backgrounds. They're gonna be the ones, in my opinion, that have grit, resilience, can roll up their sleeves, just get to work, try things. And if you're a founder, you've been building that muscle your entire career. You've been building the muscle of trying to communicate your vision, your product, your positioning, every pitch deck, every product brief, every carefully worded Slack message to your team or email to your customers. You've been communicating. So apply that communication here with Cloud Code, and you will get so much leverage out of this. Here's what I would try this week if I were you. First, just set it up. Follow the 5 minutes in the beginning of this. Just follow what I showed you. You will be up and running. Now, after you've built your little webpage, try a couple other things. Here's one prompt. Go to your competitor's website. Tell me what their positioning is, who they're targeting, and 3 things they're doing better than us. Be brutally honest. Provide links to your website, your competitor's website. Here's another one. Create a web-based ROI calculator for your product. Make it look clean enough to embed on a website. Try this out for whatever use case or product you might have. And beyond that, go ham. Do whatever else you want to do with Cloud Code. The world is your oyster. And if you're not sure about things you could do with Cloud Code, ask Cloud Code. What can I do with Cloud Code? And let me know what Cloud Code says in the comments. If you found this useful, subscribe. I'm putting out more content on how I use AI as a founder. If you want the written version with all the links I referenced and the tutorials and everything that in written form, the newsletter is in the description. I send out a newsletter every week. I'm Robert. Keep building. I believe in you.