Your first session

With Claude Code installed, the best first move is a low-stakes one: a throwaway folder where you can poke around, make a mistake, and learn the rhythm before you point it at a real paper or dataset.

Make a Sandbox

In Finder, create a new folder somewhere simple — Sandbox on your Desktop is perfect. (A plain name with no spaces saves you a bit of quoting later.) Drop a file or two inside so there’s something to look at: a short notes.txt with a few lines about a course or project will do. You genuinely can’t break anything here, which is the point.

Open it in VS Code

In VS Code, choose File → Open Folder and pick your Sandbox folder. The Explorer on the left now shows your files.

This folder is Claude’s working directory — the only place it looks unless you point it elsewhere. Opening the right folder is how you point Claude at your work, so it’s worth getting in the habit now while the stakes are zero.

Launch Claude

Open the integrated Terminal (Terminal → New Terminal, or Ctrl + `) and type:

claude

You’ll get a prompt waiting for you to type a request in plain English.

Screenshot to add

VS Code with the Sandbox folder open and the claude prompt ready in the Terminal.

Ask it a question

Start with something that only reads — nothing changes, so there’s nothing to approve:

What is this project?

Claude looks through the folder and tells you what it found. Reading is the safe on-ramp: you can ask it to summarize a file, explain a script, or list what’s in a messy directory all day long without it touching a thing.

Approve your first change

Now ask for something small that writes:

Add a one-line summary to the top of notes.txt.

This time Claude doesn’t just do it. It shows you the proposed edit as a diff — the old text and the new, side by side — and asks your permission before saving. You can approve it, deny it, or type a correction. That permission prompt is the heart of how Claude Code keeps you in control: nothing changes on disk until you say yes.

Screenshot to add

The approve / deny permission prompt with the proposed diff.

Success looks like this

You asked “what is this project?” and got a sensible answer about your folder. You asked for a small edit, saw a red/green diff, and approved it. If that’s what happened, your setup works and you understand the core loop: ask → review the diff → approve → verify. Everything else in the guide builds on this.

Managing the conversation

Claude’s memory of the current chat is finite — it’s called the context window, and a long, wandering session eventually fills it. Three commands keep it healthy:

• /context — see how full the window is right now.
• /compact — summarize the conversation so far to free up room while staying in the same session.
• /clear — wipe the slate and start a fresh conversation. (The old one isn’t lost — it’s saved, and you can return to it later with /resume.)

The habit worth forming: one focused task per session, then /clear before the next one. Cleaning the same dataset, then drafting an unrelated problem set, then debugging a figure — all in one endless conversation — muddies Claude’s context and your own sense of what it’s doing. A clean break per task keeps both of you sharp.

Handing off to the next session

When you stop for the day mid-task, don’t trust your future self to remember where things stood. Ask Claude to write it down:

Summarize where we are and what's left to do.

Next time, reopen the folder in VS Code and pick up where you left off:

claude --continue

That resumes the most recent session in this folder. (To choose from a list of past sessions instead, run claude and then /resume.)

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That’s a full session, start to finish — the same loop you’ll use on real work. From here, the guide overview points to what’s next.