IDE Setup

🎥 Video lesson — video not yet migrated (source Skool video id: caf46ea85af443cba743c424912dd156).

Claude Code works perfectly in a plain terminal. But right now, you're staring at a screen and can't see your files. When Claude Code creates something, you have to go find it manually. An IDE makes this much better.

IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. Sounds intimidating, but it's just an app that puts everything in one place. On the left — a file explorer where you see all your files and folders. In the middle — a text editor where you can open and edit any file. Most modern IDEs also have a built-in AI chat widget. And at the bottom — a terminal. The same terminal you just used to install Claude Code.

Three popular options: VS Code (by Microsoft, most popular, been around for years), Cursor (built specifically for AI coding), and Antigravity (Google's IDE, built with AI in mind). You don't need any of them — Claude Code runs fine without one. But an IDE lets you see your files, watch changes happen live, and keep everything in one window. The chapter walks through installing Antigravity and running Claude Code inside it for the first time — the moment where it clicks that you're not coding, you're having a conversation with something that can actually do things on your computer.