Install Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic's coding agent, but instead of living on a website it lives in your terminal, inside your project folder. It reads your files, writes and edits code, runs commands, and makes real changes while you explain in plain language what you want. It's not autocomplete: it's an agent you hand tasks to.

It needs Node.js, because it installs with npm. If you don't have it yet, install that first (three minutes): install Node.js.

Install it

With Node in place, paste this line into the Terminal and hit Enter:

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

The -g means "global": it installs across the whole system, so you can launch it from any folder, not just one.

Start it

Go into a project folder and type claude. The first time, it opens your browser to log in with your Anthropic account. After that, that's it: you're in.

cd my-project
claude

Check it works

If you want to confirm it without opening a session, ask for the version. If a number shows up, it's installed:

claude --version
2.0.0 (Claude Code)

If something breaks

Two common early stumbles:

• command not found: claude. Almost always it's missing Node, or the terminal is still on the old PATH. Check Node with node --version, close the terminal, and open a new one.
• Node version too old. Claude Code asks for Node 18 or higher. If node --version gives you something lower, update it with brew upgrade node.

That's it. From here, building is talking: you open claude in a project and ask for what you want. In the next tutorials I'll show you concrete workflows with it.