Claude Code Beginner Guide – Get Started in 20 Minutes (2025)

You are about to gain AI superpowers. What I'm going to show you in this video is the AI tool taking the world by storm, Claude Code. Even if you've never written a line of code before in your life, by the end of these 15 minutes, you're going to be able to build and launch money-making apps faster than you can imagine. By the end of this video, you'll be a master of how Claude Code works, how to set it up, and how to build and launch apps that will blow your mind, even if you have zero technical experience. I'll even show you two tips that will 10x your building speed. I'm serious. If you pay attention here, you'll have AI superpowers. Let's get into it. Claude Code is the most

powerful AI coding tool in the world right now. It is better than Cursor. Windsurf. It is able to build way better apps on a way larger scale with significantly less work and oversight needed. When using cursor, you need to babysit every step of the way. With clawed code, you can give a command and it'll figure out how to do it on its own and build you really incredible apps with a you not needing to write a single line of code and b with you not having to give any oversight. You give a command, it builds the app, you can walk away and you're good to go. It's like having your own senior employee working for you. And what it allows you to do is right inside your terminal on your computer just give it commands and it starts building applications for you autonomously. is able to work independently while remembering a ton of context for you. You literally just open up a terminal like you can see here on the site. If you're on Mac, you open terminal. If you're on Microsoft, you open up the command line and then you just type into the terminal what you want built and then claude code goes off and builds it for you. What I'm going to show you in this video is actually how you can open it up inside a cursor so that you can use it side by side with other AI tools to get even more power out of it. So you can see I opened up my terminal here inside a cursor. I installed Claude and I'm able to give it commands like build out this app for me and I can hit enter and it goes and it just does a tremendous amount of work. Well, if I was using cursor by itself, the agent built in, I would sit there and babysit. Claude code can do a lot of things independently. It's also built on top of the most powerful coding model that exists, which is Claude for Opus, which is 10 times better than any other AI model you can use for coding. It literally feels like you have a senior engineer working for you. I've never felt this before. When I used cursor or wind surf, it really felt like I was working with kind of like an intern that I had a handhold. But with clawed code, this feels like I'm working with like a senior engineer who is doing work for me, who I can just give commands to, then walk away and trust them to get it done. Let's talk about pricing. How much

does this cost? You have three options when it comes to Claude Code. You have the Pro Claude plan, which is $17 a month. This is a good plan to get started with and probably what I'd recommend with people just testing this out, testing the waters, playing along with this video. The pro plan only gives you access to Claude Sonnet 4, which is the less powerful model of the two Claude models, right? So, you have Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4. Sonnet 4 is still amazing and what I would consider the second best coding model in the world, and it's good enough to get started, right? If you're just testing the waters, Claude Sonnet 4 is going to do some incredible things. But when you're ready to take the leap, get serious, you also have the two max plans for Claude for $100 a month and $200 a month. And really, the only difference between these two is you get way more usage out of the $200 a month plan. But both of these give you access to Opus 4, which again is the most powerful AI coding model in the entire world. For the sake of this video, if you're new to the Claude code and the Claude ecosystem, you're just fine with the $17 a month pro plan. You can test this out with Claude Sonnet 4. And if you're as blown away as I was, then you can upgrade to the next levels. I personally am on the $200 plan, and the only reason for that is I code like 10 hours a day. So, I need the most amount of credits to build with, but you can easily get away with any of these two tiers if you're just getting started. For the sake of this video, though, I'd start with the $17 plan. So, do yourself a favor real quick, pause the video, sign up for one of these plans. Again, if you're just getting started, you're not even paying for Claude yet, you're totally cool trying this out with the 17. If you're looking to get hardcore and you want to code every single day, you can easily upgrade to the $100 whenever you want. Once that is done and you are signed up, you are ready to install Claude Code. Again, you can easily do this in your terminal. If you're just on Mac, you can open up a terminal, but what I'm going to recommend doing to install Claude Code is actually use cursor. There are a lot of advantages to running Claude code in cursor. One of them being is you can actually see the code being changed in real time. So it's a code editor, right? So you can see code being changed. And number two is you can combine it with other cursor features that I like, which I covered in my last video, but I'll touch on here as well. But you can combine the clawed code features with some other cursor AI functionality, too, which we'll get into. So do yourself a favor for the sake of this video. Download Cursor 2 if you haven't already. And I'm going to show you how to install Claude Code inside of Cursor in a second. There's a free tier, so you don't need to worry about paying for this right now either. Once you have cursor installed, feel free to open it up, open up a new project, a new folder. Very simple to do. And you will see this screen. What we're going to do now is install claude code inside our terminal inside cursor so that we can combine all the functionality together. So what you're going to do inside here is hit control tillday if you're on Mac, which opens up your terminal here, which you can see there. All we need to do, and this is very, very simple, is copy in the claw code command. So, I'm going to go back to the Claude Code site. And what you're going to see right here is this command right here. You hit copy.

You paste it into cursor right there in your terminal. And then you hit enter and Claude Code's going to install for you. Very, very simple. Once it's installed, it's just going to have you log in so we can see what plan you're on. And you're good to go. I'll also put the command down below. So, feel free to pause here, copy and paste the command from the description, and put it into your terminal. One last step. Once you have that installed, all you do is type in claude to your terminal, hit enter, and you have claude code ready to go. So there you can see it. Claude code is set. I'm going to do one more stylistic thing here that I think you should do as well. If you rightclick on the terminal up here and then do panel position, click right. I like it over here on the right hand side. Then we can close the cursor AI agent. So all we see is clawed code. I just like having it here so we can see the entire chat on the right hand side. So now we have it installed. Time to start using. Here's the fun part. This is where we get to start building the app. So I'm going to do a few things here. I'm going to show you how to build the app. I'm also going to show you two tricks I think will give you superpowers when it comes to Claude Code. I'm going to show you the kind of mindset you need when using it that's going to make you super effective. And I'm going to give you some little tricks I promise you haven't seen anywhere else that's going to make it so much easier to build apps. even if you've never written code before. So, let's do this. We have a fresh project in cursor. We have no code written whatsoever. Let's get this started. Let's start off by building a calendar app. So, I'm going to have Claude Code build out kind of the base components of the calendar app. And then I'm going to show you these really awesome tricks that are going to make it so easy to build apps with Claude Code. So, I'm going to start off by giving it a simple command to build the app. We're going to build a calendar app using Claude Code. Once we hit this, it's going to start building out the app. I'm going to go over some advantages of Claude code and how it's working. Then I'm going to give you these awesome tricks. They're going to change how you build apps forever. I put in the command.

So, let's do this. I put in the command. I want to build a calendar app using Nex. js. For those who don't know, Nex. js, very popular web app technology. It's going to make it easy to build and scale your apps. It should show a calendar view of this week and make it so I can create new events and assign dates and times to the events. It should be a really beautiful app. So, you're talking to Claude Code just like it's your employee, just like it's an engineer that works for you. Tell it what you want it to build and it's going to go build it for you. Let's set up the basic version of this app. I'll show you the tips and tricks and we'll make this app look really awesome. So, let's hit enter here. And as this is building, make sure to leave a like and subscribe if you learned anything at all. All I do is make incredible videos about how to build with AI. What Claude Code is now going to do is going to start thinking and it's going to start showing you how to build the app out. So, okay, I'll help you build a beautiful calendar app with Nex. js. Let me start off by setting up the project. So, it's What I love about Claude Code that I don't really see any other tools do is it sets up a to-do list, right? So, when you give a command to cursor, for instance, and this is a big difference between the two, it thinks very onedimensionally where cursor would be like, okay, I'm just going to oneshot this command. I'm you tell me to build a calendar app, I'm just going to oneshot building the calendar app. And when AIs try to oneshot things, that's when they usually screw up. What Claude code does is it doesn't try to oneshot it. It actually breaks it down into individual to-dos. So it makes like a to-do list for itself. Then it goes and executes on that to-do list. So instead of oneshotting everything, it breaks it down into tiny little chunks and then executes on those chunks for you. So you get really, really good result. So every step of the way it asks, do you want me to proceed? So you can approve it. If you want to go in yolo mode, you can say yes and don't ask me again. Uh let's just for the sake of this video just say yes. But as a side note, when I'm building apps personally, I go into yellow mode. I let it do whatever it wants. And I've never once ran into an issue. It never once messed anything up. So let's for the sake of this video just hit yes for it to proceed and it'll start building out our app. So as it goes through, it's going to ask for approval on installing different technologies. Don't worry here. Just hit yes. It's going to start installing all the tech you need to build out your app. And also make sure to build along with me here. So if you want, pause the video, grab the command from down below. I'm going to put all my prompts down below as well and build this out with me. The best way to learn is by doing. So as you can see here, as it goes through its to-do list, it crosses it off and then moves on to the next to-do items, which is amazing. It's like it can manage itself. It can iterate and think about what it's doing and then improve on what it's doing. So I'm just going to keep hitting yes as it goes down through its to-do list. And by the end of this, it's going to have a beautiful calendar app. Once it's done here, we're going to go into the depths around switching models, around tips and tricks, planning mode versus execution, and I'm going to give you those two hacks I think will blow your mind with Claude code. So, as you can see on the left hand side cursor, the code is being written by Claude Code. We're not doing anything. We're just sitting back relaxing while our senior developer goes and writes all the code for us. With Cursor, I need to babysit each step of the way to make sure it's running well. With Claude, I just sit back, relax, and it goes right down the list of to-do items. All right, looks like it completed the V1 of the calendar app. So, let's check out what it looks like and then we'll start getting into the workflow you want to do with Claude Code that makes it so much more powerful than any other AI tool. And I'll show you the secret to how I use it that gets you way more productivity from Claude Code. So, let's check out the app first. I'm going to bring over the local host. See what we got here. Okay, so we do have a calendar. I'm gonna be quite frank with you. It looks very ugly. This is a very ugly looking calendar. So, this is good. I'm happy it looks this ugly cuz now I can show you how to work with Claude Code to make this look way better and have way more functionality. So, let's go back into Claude Code and let's get into the secret sauce here. So, we're back into Claude Code. Here is

the secret to Claude Code. Code is planning and execution. There's two phases to cla code. And this actually isn't in any of the documentation. They just kind of expect you to know this is there's a planning mode with cloud code and an execution mode. And what you want to do is if you can nail the distinction between these two modes, you can get so much better results. So we're in Claude Code. What you want to do is hit shift tab. When you hit shift tab, you can see plan mode on. This isn't in any documentation. If you go on Claude's site and look at all the documentation, for some reason it doesn't tell you that there's a shift tab to turn plan mode on. So what you want to do when working with cloud code is you start off in plan mode through shift tab and then once you have the plan correct, you switch to execution mode with one more shift tab to execute. This is going to make it so you get so much better result. So pause here, get into plan mode, hit shift tab, and I'm going to start walking you through how to use plan mode to get incredible apps. Okay, great work. I want to first make this calendar look really nice with clean colors and easyto read minimalistic interface. Please build the plan to execute on this. Right now, it's very plain and ugly as if there's no styling. We're going to hit enter. Now, what Claude Code's going to do because it's in planning mode is build us a plan that it can execute on. So, it's designing it right now. You can see all the tokens being used. You can see which files it's reading to do the planning. If we wanted to interrupt, we can hit escape, but it's doing good so far. So, we're going to see what kind of plan it comes up with here. And then before we execute, I'm going to show you one more amazing trick that's going to make Claude code even more powerful than it already is. But let's take a look at the plan first before we do that. Okay, so here is Claude's plan. I like the little interface it gives us here. So, calendar UI enhancement plan. Look how in-depth this is. That's pretty cool. Design goals. Create a beautiful, modern, minimalistic calendar interface with soft, pleasing colors and good contrast. Improve spacing and typography and enhance the visual hierarchy. All right. And then it has a plan changes. Replace the harsh gray colors with softer colors. I like that. Oh, look at this. Glass morphism effect for modal backdrop. So, we're only a few days removed from the Apple event where they made glass morphism like the whole Apple design language. Claude Code is already aware of that. It's going to start implementing it into our calendar. So, I'm excited to see how it does. Let's see how good it can do there. Uh, and it has the rest of the plan. Smooth hover transitions. Okay, I like that. Would I like to proceed? I think that's a pretty good looking plan, don't you? Let's do this. Let's hit enter on. So, let's proceed. And now it is automatically switched to execution mode. going to implement the calendar design. So, automatically switched to execution. And now it's writing the code to make this look really, really good. And again, at this point, if I want to, I can walk away. That's how much I trust clawed code is this is the only AI where for me it's been so good. I feel like I can walk away and do other things. What I actually do is, and this would be my recommendation to you, there's one of two things you can do when cla's working. One is you can build other apps. So, I actually work on two apps at a time at all times because that's how good Claude Code is. But the other thing you can do as well if you're just getting started, and I'd recommend this, open up a second window, open up a chat, whether you like chat, GPT, or Claude, open up that chat and just chat with an AI. Talk about what you're building. Talk about what else you want to build. Talk about your life goals. Set up a life coach. Whatever you want to do. That's how I get the most productivity out of my AI sessions is I try to do two things at once. I have an AI build an app for me. And then I also have an AI coaching me, talking about plans, talking about what I'm working on, and improving my business. That's what I'd recommend for you. All right, looks like it's all done. Let's check this out. Let's see how it did. Boom. Okay, that's pretty nice styling. Let's see. We got this nice gradient on top here. All right, let's do new event. Oh, it does kind of have that glass morphism blurry effect in the background. Let's get one thing correct here. Still very ugly. There's still bordering issues here. There's still some things that need good styling, but we can work with this. This is good. Again, this was all done with pretty much two prompts so far. We have an entire calendar app with pretty cool modern styling. You can even see some of the nice little details here. There's like a glowing little dot here on the current day we're in. I like that. So, I showed you a little bit about planning and execution mode. We're going to implement a couple more features. I want to show you some other tips and tricks that are really, really critical for cloud code that are going to turn up your productivity by 10. So, let's do this. I want to show you a couple more things here. I want to show you another trick they don't show you, which is slashmodel. So, if you do slashmodel and then do opus. So, you type in opus, you are going to be able to switch to their best programming model, which is opus claude opus 4. It is by far the smartest, best AI coding model there is on planet Earth. So if you were on the hundred or $200 plan, you want to do that. You want to do /model opus. If you're still on the $17 plan, stick with sonnet. That's totally cool. It still works really, really well. Up to now, everything we've done is on the sonnet model. So it works well. But I want to add a couple more features to this calendar app. But before we do that, I want to show you

another really, really powerful trick with clawed code. If you go over here to your file system and you do new file, rightclick, new file, we're going to make a new file called claude in all caps. MD. So for markdown, this is going to be our rules file for claude code. Whatever we put in here is going to be included as context to claude code with every single prompt we do. So we're going to do is we're going to put in a few rules here that are really powerful that are going to make Claude code even better at coding. So here's the rules we're going to put in. I'll also include this down below in the description. So feel free to pause here, copy and paste it from the description and then put it into your own application. And right before I go through these rules, let's make one more file that make Claude even more powerful. So new file and we're going to call this todo. md. So another markdown file todo. md. So once you have claw. md todd and then you copy and paste these rules in, you'll be good to go for what I'm about to show you. So here we go. This is what we put in the rules. This will be included in every single clawed prompt you do now. First think through the problem, read the code base for relevant files and write a plan at todo. md. So what this is going to do is basically build us a project manager. So everything cla does it's going to add its to-do list to todo. mmarkdown. So as it goes, if we ever check back in, we can read that file and see what progress Claude has done in its to-do list. So we can track everything it's doing step by step. So that's really powerful. The plan should have a list of to-do items that you can check off as you complete them. Just as I explained before you begin work, check with me and I'll verify the plan. Kind of what we're doing with the plan mode. One other really important rule here that's I included as well is make every task and code change you do as simple as possible. We want to avoid any making any massive or complex changes. This is just a good rule to include in any other AI programming tool you use. So I include that as well. So we have this rule list here. This is included with every single Claude command you do. And this is going to make it so that A the changes that Claude Code makes are impactful. And B, it keeps you up to date with everything that Claude Code is doing. So you can track progress as it goes, which makes it really easy to manage. It's kind of like setting boundaries for your own software engineer that's working for you. So now that we set up all our guard rails here, let's put everything I've taught you together so far into this and keep building our calendar app. Right? So far, I taught you about planning in execution mode. giving it rules that it will follow to make really good changes. And then I taught you about the to-do list file that it's going to keep track of all its tasks in. So now we're really organized. Claude Code is going to be a really good employee for us. And it's going to write really good code. So let's go back into Claude Code. Let's do shift tab to go back into planning mode and let's start building out more features here. So, one thing I like to do before I give more commands to Claude Code, and this is a really good tip as well for using Cloud Code, I think you'll like. So, what I

want to do next is add to-do items to the calendar. So, we can also add to-do instead of events. But, I want to get a feel for what Claude Code thinks it should do next. So, since it's such a powerful smart model, before I do any next steps, I want to get insight into what it thinks we should do next. So, here's what I'm going to do. What do you think we should add to make this calendar even more powerful? One of my favorite things to do with AIS, especially Claude Code, because it's so smart, is just ask for its opinion. What should we add next? What do you think we can do to improve it? And a lot of the time, what I find is to actually give suggestions that I never thought of that makes the app way more powerful. So, let's hit enter on that in plan mode and let's see what kind of plan it comes up with. All right, so here's the plan. Wow, look at this plan. Let's here's the plan that they came up with. Powerful features. One, event persistence and storage. Okay, so being able to store the events to a database. That's pretty good for future proofing. Adding recurring events, adding multiple views. Oo, I like that. Advanced event feature. So being able to add descriptions, categories, locations, attachments. That's pretty cool. Search and filter, keyboard shortcuts. So I like some of these event management. Let's have it implement the event management. So I'm going to come back in. I'm going to say I'm going to hit the escape button. I'm going to say I really like the event management recommendation. Make it so I can manage drag and drop events in the calendar. So we're going to switch back to execution mode. So sift shift tab and I'm going to hit enter and it's going to get to work and by the end of what it's doing, I'm going to have that implemented, right? And so this is the most powerful way to work with cloud code where we're going back and forth. I'm asking for ideas. We're bouncing ideas and I tell it, okay, go ahead and execute on the ideas. This is what makes Claude code so much more powerful than anything else out there. Okay, looks like it's all done here. What did we get? So, with that one prompt, Claude Code added drag and drop events, edit events, delete events, event persistence, description field in the enhanced UX. So, let's check this out. Let's see how it did here. So, we have the calendar. Let's add an event. Record a YouTube video. Let's give it a date of today. Let's create the event. Boom. There it is. Let's see. Can we drag and drop it? We can. I mean, that looks just like Google Calendar. That's pretty amazing. So, it added the drag and drop, which is sick. Let's see if we can edit it. Yep, Let's give it a different theme. Update it. It updates it. So, we added entirely new editing with just that one prompt. And it did it made it looks really nice. I think the whole thing looks really nice. And this is what I love to do with AI is I love to take any apps I use regularly that I pay for like Google Calendar and just build my own version of it. then I can go back, cancel the plan, save money. AI is actively saving me money. So again, here are the three main ways to get the most out of clawed code. You want to think about planning versus execution. So being in planning mode, then switching to execution mode. Get a really powerful plan and then execute on it. You want to have your clawed rules set up, which again, pause, look down below in the description. I have all the rules you need. Put that into your rules file. That makes sure Claude code runs very, very smoothly. And then you want to think about project management. So you want to think about managing your tasks, managing what you want to build next, and making sure Claude Code manages that so that it thinks about the bigger picture as it's completing all its small tasks. Claude Code is the most powerful AI coding tool I've ever used. If you use it properly and you know how to communicate with it, you can get more out of it than you can possibly imagine. It can build incredible things without you needing to babysit every single step of the way. I'm now using it over cursor. Windsurf. It is amazing. Feel free to watch this back over all my tips and tricks and rules again so that you can become a Claude Code master. And if master, you can build anything you want. To see my advanced workflow with Claude Code, feel free to check out the video linked somewhere on this screen right now. It'll show you how I use it side by side with other AI tools to build really amazing things. And make sure to hit the subscribe button and leave a like if you learned anything at all. All I do is make awesome videos about how to build stuff with AI. I'll see you in the next video.