Claude Code, explained by monkey

(and how to set it up)

comment: BANANAOct 15, 2026

Claude Code is an AI that lives on your computer and builds things for you from plain English. Here's what it does, and the whole setup in five minutes.

Claude Code is Anthropic's AI coding tool. You describe what you want in plain words, and it reads your project, writes the code across as many files as it needs, runs it to check it works, and fixes what breaks. By default it asks you before it edits files or runs commands, so nothing big happens without a yes from you.

Install it

Open a terminal (Mac: Terminal app; Windows: PowerShell) and paste one line.

terminal

# Mac, Linux, WSL
$curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

powershell

# Windows PowerShell
>irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

Open a new terminal window and check it worked:

terminal

$claude --version

Start it in a folder

Make an empty folder for your app, go into it, and start Claude Code. It asks you to log in the first time.

terminal

$mkdir banana-app
$cd banana-app
$claude

Ask for what you want, in normal words

say this to Claude:

Make me a simple web app that counts bananas. One big banana button adds one, a reset button sets it back to zero, and the count stays saved when I refresh the page. Then open it in my browser so I can try it.

Claude plans it, writes the files, runs it, and asks before anything risky. Say yes when it asks, or tell it what to change.

Tips monkey learned

Say what it should do, not how to code it
Ask it to run and test its own work: 'run it and fix anything broken'
Add a CLAUDE.md file with notes it should always remember (it reads it every session)
Don't like the desktop terminal? Claude Code also runs in VS Code, a desktop app, and at claude.ai/code

Claude Code docsthe official overview and quickstart