Install and the
three surfaces

You have a constitution now. Before you can put it to work, you need the tool open in front of you. This is the easy part, which is exactly why it stops so many people. Nobody ever froze halfway through downloading a music app. Put the word "AI" on it and suddenly the download button feels load-bearing. It is not. The hard bit was never installing. It was the small fear that you would press the wrong thing and break something expensive.

You will not break anything. Almost nothing you can click in your first hour is dangerous, and the few things that are will ask you first, in plain words. The freeze is a feeling, not a fact. We are going to walk past it together.

Claude lives in a few places: a website you open in your browser, a desktop app you download, and a mobile app. They are the same brain. Pick whichever is in front of you right now. Once you are in, the only thing worth understanding is that there are three ways of working, and beginners do better when they know which one they are in.

One honest practical note before you go further. There is a free tier, and there are paid plans above it. You do not need to pay to do most of this course. The one thing worth knowing now: paid plans come with usage limits that reset on a schedule, so a heavy day can hit a ceiling and pause you until the reset. These limits come in two flavours, and naming them means a pause never feels like a fault: there is a general ceiling across everything, and on some plans a second, separate limit tied to one particular model. Either way it refills on its own. That is normal, not you doing something wrong. Prices and limits change often, so check the current numbers on the official pricing page rather than trusting any figure you read in a course, including this one.

Same assistant, three modes. The difference is how much it is allowed to do on its own. Start on the left and move right as your nerve grows.

Here is the first hour, honestly. You install it, you open it, and you get a blank box with a cursor blinking at you. The instinct is to type something clever. Do not. Type something real and small. The point of the first request is to prove to yourself that nothing breaks.

Somewhere in your first session, especially in Cowork or Code, a little box will appear asking permission to do something: read a file, make a change, run a step. This is the moment people freeze, hand hovering over the mouse like it is a bomb disposal scene. Here is the honest version: read what it says, and if it is doing the thing you asked for, click yes. The permission box is not a trap. It is the tool being polite. You stay in control because it keeps asking. We come back to exactly which mistakes are even possible in Chapter 12. For now: if it matches what you asked, yes.

The blank box is not waiting for something clever. It is waiting for something real. Type that, and you are already in.