Installing Claude Code & Cursor — Getting Set Up

🎥 Video lesson — video not yet migrated (source Skool video id: ef0b5b1887b044fa8be99b090c09f3b1).

Installing Claude Code & Cursor — Getting Your Dev Environment Set Up

This video walks you through installing everything you need to start building with Claude and Cursor from scratch. We're doing it on a brand new Mac so you can see every step, including the errors you might hit along the way.

What we install:

Key steps:

  1. Download and install both Claude Desktop and Cursor
  2. Open Cursor and create a project folder (e.g. Documents → Repositories → Automations)
  3. Install Node.js via the terminal (one-time setup)
  4. Run npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code in the terminal to install Claude Code
  5. Type claude in the terminal to launch Claude Code and follow the login prompts
  6. Select "Claude subscription" as your login method so usage stays within your monthly plan

Which Claude plan do you need? The Pro plan ($20/month) running the Sonnet model is enough for most people starting out. If you're hitting rate limits regularly, you can upgrade later. Adam runs the Max plan for heavy Claude Code usage.

Getting errors during install? Every computer is different, so you might hit issues. Copy the exact error message and paste it into Claude Cowork with a prompt like: "I'm trying to install Claude Code in Cursor's CLI and getting this error. Can you help me troubleshoot?" — it can check your system and walk you through fixes.

Troubleshooting tip: Make sure Node.js is fully installed before trying the Claude Code npm install command. If npm isn't recognised, restart your terminal after the Node.js installation.

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