What Claude Code is (and isn't)

Before you spend half an hour setting anything up, here’s enough to decide whether Claude Code is worth your time.

Claude Code is an AI agent — an assistant that works on the actual files on your computer. You drive it by typing a request in plain English, and it reads, writes, and edits files in a folder you point it at — a paper, a dataset, a folder of scripts. It asks your permission before it changes anything, so you stay in control the whole time. You stay the reviewer; it does the legwork.

How it differs from Claude in a browser

If you’ve used Claude on the web, you know the rhythm: you paste text in, it answers, you copy the answer back out. Claude Code closes that loop. Instead of copying a regression table into a chat window and pasting the cleaned version back, you point Claude at the folder and it edits the file in place — then shows you exactly what it changed. It can see how your files relate to each other, run commands, and carry context across a working session, rather than starting fresh from whatever you remembered to paste.

What it’s good for in academic work

A few grounded examples, drawn from the two halves of the job:

• Untangling a messy replication folder. Point it at a directory of half-named scripts and stale data extracts and ask what runs in what order, or to write the one end-to-end script that reproduces a result.
• Turning lecture notes into a problem set. Hand it a set of notes and ask for five practice problems with worked solutions in the same notation — then revise the ones that miss.
• Tightening a working paper. Ask it to read a draft section and flag where the argument repeats itself or an undefined term appears before its definition.

It’s good at the mechanical, legwork-heavy parts of research and teaching — the reorganizing, drafting, and cross-checking that eat your afternoons. It is not a substitute for your judgment about what’s correct.

The one rule that governs everything

Claude can be confidently wrong. It will produce a citation, a page number, a quoted passage, or a data value that looks completely plausible and is simply invented. For an economist, that’s the thing to internalize before anything else: treat everything it produces as a draft to verify against the original source, never as a finished fact. You are the reviewer of record — nothing it writes enters your work until you’ve checked it. We come back to this rule throughout the guide.

What you’ll need

A Mac running a recent version of macOS, a paid Claude plan — as of mid-2026, Pro is the usual starting point and Max also works, while the free plan does not include Claude Code (plans change, so check Anthropic’s current requirements when you set up) — and about thirty minutes for a one-time setup.

Ready? The next chapter walks you through the one-time setup: set up Claude Code — install the tool, sign in, and get VS Code running as your home base.