1.3
Install And First Run
What you need for this one
- Download Claude for MacUniversal build — works on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
- Claude plans and pricingOnly if you still need to sort the plan from 1.2.
Why this exists
This is the shortest idea in the course and the one people are most nervous about. Installing software is mechanical — you'll be done in ten minutes.
What's worth two minutes of your attention is what you're agreeing to when you do it, because this is the moment the thing gets hands.
The idea
Installing is the easy part. Understanding what you just allowed is the lesson.
Up to now Claude has been on the other side of a window. It could talk. That was all it could do, and everything it produced had to come through you.
When you install Claude Code and point it at a folder, that stops. It can now read files you never showed it, write new ones, change existing ones, and run things on your machine. That's the entire point — it's what you watched in 1.1 — and it's also the thing to be clear-eyed about.
Two ideas make that safe, and they're both in this lesson because you need them before your first session, not after your first mistake:
One: it asks first. By default Claude Code checks with you before it does anything that changes something. You'll see a prompt describing what it wants to do, and it waits. You are not handing over the keys; you're approving each move. Level 1.7 covers how much it asks and when to change that. For now the default is right, and the default is cautious.
Two: start where nothing matters. Your first sessions happen in a folder you created for this course, containing files you'd shrug at losing. Not your documents. Not work files. Not anything you'd have to explain. You'll graduate to real things in Level 5, after Level 4 teaches you to undo — that order is deliberate, and it's the same order any sensible person uses with a new power tool.
That's it. That's the whole idea. The rest of this lesson is clicking things.
One practical note before you start: the install will ask you to sign in, and it'll ask for permission to access files. Both are expected. What you should not see is anything asking for payment details beyond the plan you already sorted in 1.2, or asking for access to your whole machine at once. If you see either, stop and message me.
Do
- Download Claude Code for Mac and install it.
- Sign in with the same account you set up in 1.2. If it shows you as free tier, you've used the wrong account.
- Make a new folder on your Desktop called
sandbox. Put two or three files in it you would not care about losing — copy something, make a text file, anything. - Open Claude Code and point it at
sandbox. - Ask it:
what files are in here?Check the answer against Finder. - Ask it to change one of them —
add a line at the bottom of that text file saying hello. When the permission prompt appears, read it before approving. Actually read it. - Approve. Open the file in Finder and confirm the change is real.
- Ask it to make you something new —
write me a file called first.md with a list of what's in this folder. - Write one line in
first.md: what did the permission prompt actually say?
Step 6 is the one to slow down on. That prompt will appear hundreds of times and within a week you'll be approving it on reflex. Read one properly, once, while it's still novel.
Done when
Never do
Don't point it at anything that matters yet. Sandbox folder only, until Level 5. You don't have undo yet — that's Level 4 — and working without undo on files you care about is the one genuinely unrecoverable mistake available to you this week.
Don't approve prompts without reading them, this week. The reflex is coming and it's fine when it arrives, but it should arrive after you've built a sense of what normal looks like — not before.
If anything asks for payment details or for access to your entire machine, stop and message me. Neither is part of this install.