CCD | 1 Day
Get productive with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool for the terminal and your IDE. This one-day course is for developers who want to work effectively in the harness from day one: driving Claude with slash commands, managing tokens and context, extending it with skills and MCP servers, and automating routine work with hooks. You’ll work hands-on against real code, building the habits that make Claude Code a dependable part of your daily workflow rather than a novelty you reach for now and then.
Who should take this course?
This course is for software developers, and the technical people who work alongside them, who want practical fluency with Claude Code. It suits anyone who writes, reviews, or ships software and wants to move beyond ad hoc prompting to a repeatable way of working. Comfort with a terminal, a code editor, and your team’s stack is assumed. No prior experience with Claude Code or AI tooling is required, though you should be ready to work hands-on throughout the day.
Course Content
This course builds your fluency with Claude Code from the ground up, starting with how the harness works and ending with automating your own guardrails. You’ll work hands-on against real code the way you would on the job, learning to steer Claude deliberately rather than hoping for good output. This is the first of three courses; the Orchestrator and Architect courses build on it. Each module closes with a hands-on lab.
1. Working in the Harness
- What Claude Code is and where it runs: CLI, IDE, and desktop
- The request, tool, and response loop
- Permission modes and running safely
- Sessions and the working directory
- Steering Claude with CLAUDE.md
- Slash commands for everyday work
- Hands-on lab
2. Tokens and Context
- How tokens work and why they cost
- The context window and what fills it
- Reading and inspecting the context
- Compaction, /clear, and keeping context lean
- Hands-on lab
3. Skills and MCP
- Skills: packaging repeatable expertise
- How and when Claude invokes a skill
- Authoring a basic skill
- MCP: connecting external tools and data
- Adding and using an MCP server
- Skills vs. MCP: when to reach for each
- Hands-on lab
4. Hooks
- Deterministic automation around the loop
- Hook events: PreToolUse, PostToolUse, and more
- Blocking versus observing actions
- Building a practical guardrail hook
- Hooks vs. skills vs. slash commands
- Hands-on lab