Personal Tutor Follow Along: Claude Code and Python

These steps are written for Mac users. If you’re on Windows, you’ll need to do a Step 1.5. Don’t let this discourage you – I tried Claude Code on Windows, and it works better on Linux (via WSL). I had this confirmed one degree away from Anthropic engineers too.

Create your claude.ai project

Create a claude.ai Project with a nice name 🐞 and set the project instruction:

Then set this as the project instruction and refine later as desired:

You are a software engineer coach for intelligent adult beginners.

You specialise in:
- VSCode on Mac
- Git and GitHub for source control
- Python with UV Package and Project Manager (never pip or requirements.txt)
- Claude Code AI agent in VSCode terminal

When researching or uncertain, prioritise official sources and recent 2025 documentation.

Example key sources include:
- Claude Code: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview
- UV: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/
- UV with Jupyter: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/jupyter/
- VSCode: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs

Provide clear, well-formatted explanations with helpful emojis are great!
Use tables when they aid understanding and for "information at a glance" (use emojis).

Recreate Conversations Incrementally

Mimic each conversation incrementally into your own project. Copy the first instruction → paste it into a chat. Follow Claude’s response before moving on in case you have questions or problems.

Notes:

• Which claude.ai model? Use Opus 4.1 for responses to align closer to mine (otherwise Sonnet 4)
• Tip for line breaks: If you lose the line breaks when pasting: Copy my instruction → paste into VSCode “temp.md” file → copy and paste into claude.ai
• Why not ask Claude Code? Many of these instructions could be done with Claude Code. But for easy reference later and a smoother learning journey, start with this well organised project.

You will hit bumps as you complete these steps. Detail what you did, the problem, and ask it to ask you for additional helpful information (like commands to run) to help investigate the problem. The greater significance of this article is learning how to collaborate with Claude on almost anything.

Ordered Achievements Across All 6 Conversations

✅ Installed VSCode on Mac
✅ Created GitHub account
✅ Configured Git with name and email
✅ Created ~/projects/ directory structure
✅ Installed Oh My Zsh
✅ Customised zsh prompt for better readability
✅ Installed UV package manager
✅ Created UV project ~/projects/python/my-python-project
✅ Installed VSCode extensions (Microsoft Python, Jupyter, Ruff)
✅ Configured VSCode settings.json for UV + formatting
✅ Pushed project to GitHub
✅ Enabled Jupyter notebooks with uv add –dev ipykernel
✅ Created demo_notebook.ipynb → pushed to GitHub
✅ Installed Node.js 18+ (Claude Code prerequisite)
✅ Installed Claude Code via npm i -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
✅ Initialised Claude Code project with /init → created CLAUDE.md
✅ Installed Ruff with uv add –dev ruff
✅ Installed pre-commit with uv add –dev pre-commit
✅ Created .pre-commit-config.yaml with UV sync + Ruff hooks
✅ Installed pre-commit hooks with uv run pre-commit install
✅ Updated CLAUDE.md with UV-specific workflows & commands
✅ Tested changes made to CLAUDE.md with /clear verification

Great progress across all 6 conversations – everything completed! 🎉

Where to Next?

Wherever you want. But here are some sequenced ideas.

I code to streamline my work, and I like building for fun. I jumped onto Claude Code for the untapped potential of non-coding use cases. Such as the Anthropic growth marketing team. Having worked across disciplines and industries, the potential is enormous. Getting the basics above, you will start to see it.

Aside: Be Mad and Try It

The BMAD repo has a collection of interactive prompt templates to produce markdown documentation. These ultimately drive AI development. That is, it’s a streamlined approach with disparate humans in the loop using any information (e.g., masses of customer feedback). You can alter it to run in Claude Code.

♥️ Claude Code — Not Just Code

Claude Code has unbridled possibility beyond coding, in addition to the “BMAD” methodology. For instance, you could get it to scrape websites (e.g. with FireCrawl MCP), download YouTube transcripts, etc. and synthesise to your research delight. Add in customer data and extract insights. Push it through to your product workflows. It is limited to your imagination. If you want a beautiful experience Claude Code experience but not in an IDE, try https://bearclaude.specstory.com (currently free at writing):

Good luck.

• LinkedIn