Claude Code Masterclass Level 1 · Setup & Vocabulary All lessons

1.5

Where Things Live

Time
20 minutes
You'll end up with
A map of your own home folder, and three full paths

What you need for this one

Why this exists

Last lesson: Claude can only see the folder it's standing in. Which makes "which folder is that, exactly" the most practically important question you can answer — and most people can't, because they've used a Mac for fifteen years by clicking on things and never once looked at the structure underneath.

That's fine for normal use. It stops being fine the moment you have to tell something else where to look.

The idea

Your Mac is a filing cabinet with one drawer per person, and everything you own is inside yours.

That drawer is your home folder. It's named after you. Everything you've ever saved — Desktop, Documents, Downloads, the lot — is a folder inside it. There is nothing of yours outside it.

It's used so constantly that it has a shorthand: ~. That squiggle means "my home folder." When you see ~/Desktop, that reads as "the Desktop folder, inside my home folder." You'll see it everywhere from now on.

A path is just the route from the front door to the thing, with each door separated by a slash:

~/Desktop/sandbox/notes.txt
│  │       │       └── the file
│  │       └────────── a folder on the Desktop
│  └────────────────── the Desktop folder
└───────────────────── your home folder

Read it left to right and it's directions. That's all a path ever is. It looks technical because of the slashes; it's just "in here, then in here, then this one."

Three folders you already have, and one habit that matters:

Folder What it's for
~/Desktop Things you're working on now. Visible, temporary.
~/Documents Things you're keeping.
~/Downloads A waiting room. Things arrive here. They should not stay.

The habit: don't work in Downloads. It's the single most common mess. Downloads is where things land from the internet — it fills with duplicates, versions with (1) after them, and things you'll delete in a clear-out without checking. Files that matter get moved out of it the moment they arrive. Anything you point Claude at should never live there.

And the trick worth knowing today, because it saves you from ever typing a path by hand: drag any file into a terminal window and it types the full path for you. You'll use it constantly. There's a menu-based version too — right-click a file in Finder, hold ⌥ (option), and "Copy as Pathname" appears.

Do

  1. Turn on the path bar: Finder → View → Show Path Bar. Leave it on permanently.
  2. Open your home folder — Finder → Go → Home, or ⇧⌘H.
  3. Look at what's actually in there. Most people have never looked. Note anything you didn't know was there.
  4. Draw or write a simple map in my-mac.md: your home folder, and the folders inside it you actually use.
  5. Now get three full paths, using the drag trick: - Your sandbox folder from 1.3 - Any file in Documents - Any file on your Desktop
  6. Write all three into my-mac.md. Look at them together — spot the part they all share.
  7. Open your Downloads folder. Count how many files are in there and how many you'd struggle to identify. Write the numbers down.
  8. Move anything from Downloads you'd actually miss into somewhere it belongs.

Step 6 is where it clicks. All three paths start the same way, because everything you own lives in the same drawer. Once you've seen that, paths stop looking like code.

Done when

Never do

Don't work out of Downloads, and never point Claude at it. It's a waiting room. Things there get deleted in clear-outs, duplicated on re-download, and buried. A file you care about should be out of there the same day it arrives.