Notes that I wrote for work on how to get started with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic code tool. Anthropic’s own documentation is good, but I wanted a single page that I could share with people to help them get rapidly up to speed. Once past this stage, their Claude code best practices page is excellent. Installation You’ll need to setup an API key to use it. Put this in $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY then run the installer: ...
Some AI development resources this week… How to Build an AI Code Agent Thorsten Ball has published how to build your own AI code agent. He creates a toy example in Rust that’s <400 lines but still includes tool use. Geoffrey Huntley does the same. It’s worth reading both Claude Code Best Practices Anthropic has released a detailed guide on Claude Code best practices. Of note: Claude can (and should!) use the architect/plan then code model that Aider makes explicit. Telling Claude to read code/docs, then plan, then code, then commit gives better results than just telling it to write code Ask Claude to review things (e.g. the CLAUDE.md hint files) and suggest improvements. Repeat. (As an aside, the Anthropic workbench can improve general prompts) Telling Claude to ’think’, ’think harder’ etc results in more thinking tokens being used Clear context frequently (/clear) - usable context window is smaller than the advertised max The model of asking Claude to review and improve its work (or human starting points) repeatedly was not obvious to me ...