Claude Code: Setup, Commands, and Context

Intended Audience: Faculty who work regularly with the Claude desktop app but have little or no experience with Claude Code, command line tools or code editors. Faculty who are regular users of Claude Code or who are experienced programmers may wish to skip this session

Day 2 will be an on-ramp to Claude Code for faculty ready to move beyond Cowork into a more technical environment. We'll install Claude Code and VS Code, get set up on GitHub, and get comfortable with the built-in commands and settings.  We will assume that you have not yet set these tools up, and that you may never have worked in a code editor before.  We will help you (both during the session and in an additional 90 minutes of office hours) troubleshoot the many quirky steps of getting command line tools running on your own machine (though we will also have Bok computers available for you to use as well with all the tools preloaded).  You will learn how CLAUDE.md files and skills work in the Claude Code environment, how to manage context files in VS Code, and, of course, how and why you might want to write some code (even if you’ve never done it before!). We'll close with a preview of skills to set up Day 3.