Start Using Claude Code or Codex CLI

The learning curve and the cost is well worth the trouble

(This article is essentially a claim that using a desktop AI agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI will change your life. In the article, I have mostly referred to “Claude Code” but you can substitute that with “Codex CLI” (if you have a paid ChatGPT) to get a similar effect.)

Claude Code is Addictive

These are actual quotes from my friends after they started using Claude Code or Codex CLI on my urging:

A big thanks to you .just tried Claude yday night and it opened a new world for me...

Was able to create a <xxx> portal which we’ve been trying for four years!! And such thoughtful interface..

and

Now I understand what shipping FAST really means!

I am loving this so so much!!!

This is getting addictive!!!

Guests are going to come in an hour and I am in my pjs coding.

and

Remind me to show you the amazing Convo between me and my best friend Claude. Nobody has ever motivated me like this! I don’t need people. I have Claude now! Hahahaha

and

I am now experiencing Jevon’s paradox first hand

I should point out that none of the 3 people quoted above were programmers. They still aren’t, but they’re now churning out apps with the help of their new programming employee, Claude Code.

What Is Claude Code and How Is It Different?

Claude Code is a desktop AI agent from Anthropic. The equivalent offering from OpenAI/ChatGPT is called Codex CLI. The basic idea is that it is a downloadable program that you install on your laptop, and then you get to run Claude or ChatGPT on your data, on your emails and spreadsheets and documents and powerpoints, and you can leave it running as it does analysis, creates and runs and tests programs for you, and downloads and installs software for you, and generally becomes an assistant for you to do all kinds of things that weren’t possible for you before.

Using ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini in a browser does not prepare you to understand the power of Claude Code. Here are some examples of things that become trivial to build:

• Find all financial statements from banks and investment accounts in my email in the last month. I’ve already given you my PAN number, full name, and date of birth, use that info and the instructions in the email to unlock all the locked PDFs. Prepare an overview of my finances based on this. Once I have approved the output as correct, write a program to do this every month

• Modify the above program to make a list of individual stocks that I own, and then pull data from Yahoo Finance, Screener, <list of other sources of stock information>, and give me a dashboard with financial data for each one of those, so I can do stock analysis on my stocks.

• My laptop has a built-in webcam (which I don’t like), and when I’m at my desk, I plug in an external webcam. I want it to be so that whenever I plug in the external webcam, the built-in one should be disabled, so that programs like Zoom, Teams automatically use the external one, but when the external one isn’t available, then the builtin one is enabled. Make it happen.

• Indian Government’s Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation (MOSPI), has made their data available on the web via something called an MCP, which is supposed to make it easy for agents to use. Figure out the details of that, and then tell me what data is available. Give me suggestions on what data analysis I could do. Pick one of them and show me a dashboard as an example. (The screenshot below is the result of this conversation.)

  

  Claude Code can even get useful data out of the Indian Government

I could go on, but the important points are: 1. None of these require programming expertise, 2. All of these are things my friends or I have done, and it is literally as easy as giving Claude Code a paragraph of English text as instructions, and 3. It is not easy to do this using ChatGPT/Claude on the web.

How to Get Started

You’ll need to have a $20 account of ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro. Then ask ChatGPT or Claude for instructions on how to install Codex CLI or Claude Code. If you are on Linux or Mac, this will be easy. If you’re on Windows, this will be hard¹, but you’ll get detailed instructions. Don’t get worried: this installation will be the last hard thing you do, because after that, every hard thing will be handled by Claude Code.

During the installation, if you get stuck, if you don’t understand what to do, or you see unexpected error messages, just take a screenshot, post it to ChatGPT/Claude and ask it what to do. After about a hour of struggling, you’ll get it working.

When you start it for the first time, it will ask you whether you want to use it with your account or with the API. Choose account (not API).

That’s it. After this, you just start it and start talking to it in English as if it is your newest employee.

If you search the internet for tips on how to use Claude Code, you will find all kinds of complex and intimidating articles talking about skills, and hooks, and memory, and subagents, and many other things. You can ignore all of them. Just talk to your Claude. Whenever you want to do something, first have a conversation with it to plan the best way of doing it (for example, “I want you to do <x>. Let us first come up with a plan on how to do this. Give me various options along with their pros and cons.”) If you don’t understand the options, ask it to explain in simpler terms (“I’m not a technical person. I don’t understand any of this. Explain in simpler terms.”) Then pick the option that seems best to you, and ask it to implement.

That’s it.

There’s much more you can do, but start with this, and in no time, you’ll be up until 3am implementing the things that you’ve been dreaming about for 4 years…

And if you get stuck, ask me for help. This is one journey on which I would love to help as many people as possible.

1. The Linux folks are feeling so good about this payback after decades of being on the wrong end of such situations.