claudhopper

Three ways across the pond

Pick the path that matches where you are. Each one is a short list of things to do, in order, with the page or video shelf that covers it.

Tadpole, Hopper, Bullfrog. Nobody skips leg day.

Tadpole

You have never used Claude, or you have only asked it trivia.

  1. Open claude.ai and have one real conversation about something you are working on this week.
  2. Watch two or three videos from the Start here shelf.
  3. Take Anthropic's free AI Fluency: Framework and foundations course (about 4 hours, 14 lessons).
  4. Make one Project for a thing you do repeatedly, and put its instructions and files in it.
  5. Read the fable. It is short, and the moral is the whole course.

Hopper

You use Claude most days and want it doing work on your machine.

  1. Install Claude Code and ask it what one of your projects does.
  2. Take Anthropic's free Claude Code 101.
  3. Write a short CLAUDE.md for one project. Ten lines is a fine start.
  4. Work through the Claude Code shelf: daily workflow, then skills, hooks and MCP.
  5. Add one MCP server you will use every week, and one skill for a task you repeat.
  6. Read which model to use when, so you stop paying flagship prices for chores.

Bullfrog

You are building agents or putting Claude inside a product.

  1. Read the four ways in and pick one on purpose.
  2. Build the Agent SDK quickstart agent.
  3. Work through the build shelf, then the production shelf on evals and guardrails.
  4. Turn on prompt caching and move anything that can wait to Batch. The pricing page shows what that saves.
  5. Take Anthropic's free Building effective human-agent teams course (45 minutes, in beta).
  6. Write evals before you scale. A bullfrog that cannot tell whether it is right is a loud clodhopper.

Anthropic's own free courses

Course details from academy.claude.com and the Claude Code docs, read on November 11, 2026.

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