1.8
The Vocabulary
Why this exists
From next week these words appear constantly — in lessons, in what people say online, in things I'll say to you on calls. If you don't have them, everything after this is fog you nod along to, and you won't be able to point at which bit lost you.
Most courses leave this to week seven, once you've built one of each. That's backwards. You need the nouns before the sentences.
The idea
Eight words. They sort into four groups, and the groups are the point.
Learn them as a glossary and they slide off. Learn them as four questions and they stay.
Where the work happens
| Word | Means |
|---|---|
| Project | A folder Claude is pointed at. It sees everything inside, nothing outside. Permanent. |
| Session | One conversation, inside a project. Has a weight, gets cleared. Temporary. |
You met both already: the folder survives, the conversation doesn't.
What it can reach
| Word | Means |
|---|---|
| Tool | Something Claude can do — read a file, run something, search. Built in. |
| Connector | A link to an outside service — your email, calendar, a database. You switch these on. |
| MCP | The standard way connectors are built, so any service can plug into any AI. |
The thing worth holding: a connector is the link, MCP is the shape of the plug. You use connectors constantly and think about MCP roughly never — until Level 7, when you build one.
What it knows how to do
| Word | Means |
|---|---|
| Skill | A written instruction file. A name, a description of when to use it, and steps. Claude reads the description, decides if it applies, follows the steps. |
| Plugin | Several skills bundled together so they can be shared or installed as one thing. |
A skill is the single most misunderstood word here, so be precise: it's a document, not software. You could print one. Its power is that it's written down once and then followed consistently, instead of you re-explaining a process every time.
Who does the work
| Word | Means |
|---|---|
| Agent | Claude working towards an outcome on its own — deciding steps, doing them, checking, continuing. |
| Subagent | An extra agent spun up to handle one piece, with its own clean slate, reporting back. |
Every one of these is something you can point at in the interface. That's the test of whether you've got it: can you find it on screen? If you can only describe it, you don't have it yet.
Two you'll hear and can safely ignore for now: token (a chunk of text — it's how usage gets counted, covered in 2.2) and model (which version of Claude — Level 1.2's plan decision already handled it).
Do
- Open Claude Code in your
sandboxproject. - Go through all eight words and find each one on your screen. Don't move on from one until you've located it.
- For skills specifically: open an actual skill file and read it. See for yourself that it's a document.
- Write
vocabulary.md— all eight words, one line each, in your own words. Not copied from above. - Beside each, note where you found it: which panel, which menu, which part of the screen.
- Any you couldn't find, mark with a
?and send me that list. - Last: write one sentence using at least four of them correctly. Something like "I opened a session in my sandbox project and used a skill that needed a connector."
Step 6 is not a failure state — it's the most useful thing you'll send me all week. A word you can't locate is either a gap in the lesson or a gap in the interface, and both are worth knowing.
Done when
That's week one. You installed it, pointed it at a folder, watched it work, learned the controls, set the guardrails, and got the language. Next week is why any of it behaves the way it does.