I’d been watching Claude Code from a distance for three months. It launched in February as a “research preview” — a terminal-only tool that let an AI read your files, run your code, and actually build things alongside you. Not a chatbot you paste code into. An agent that lives in your development environment. Anthropic’s announcement on February 24 called it “a limited research preview” that “enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks to Claude directly from their terminal.”
The concept was exactly what I’d been waiting for. Getting it running was another matter entirely.
I’d been building with Replit for months and genuinely loved it. The browser-based environment meant zero setup. You opened a project, described what you wanted, and Replit’s AI built it. For someone who thinks in systems and products rather than syntax, it was a revelation. I built working prototypes in hours that would have taken weeks to spec out and hand to a developer.
But I kept hitting walls. The AI would lose context on larger projects. Deployment options were limited. And there was a ceiling — the abstractions that made it easy to start eventually made it hard to go deep. I was building within Replit’s constraints instead of building what I actually wanted.
Every conversation I had with builders further down this path pointed to the same place: Claude Code. The jump from browser-based AI coding to a proper terminal agent was supposed to be transformative. What nobody mentioned was the installation gauntlet you had to survive first.
What I assumed: download a thing, run a thing, start coding. What actually happened was a good deal more circuitous.
Claude Code runs on Node.js. I didn’t have Node.js. Most non-developers don’t. To install Node.js on a Mac, you need Homebrew. To install Homebrew, you need Xcode Command Line Tools. So the dependency chain for “install an AI coding tool” was actually Xcode CLT, then Homebrew, then Node.js, then npm, then Claude Code. Five installations before you can type your first prompt.
Each one had its own adventure. Xcode tools alone took 15 minutes to download. Homebrew’s install script requires pasting a wall of text into Terminal — an application most Mac users have literally never opened. Node.js version management was its own rabbit hole. Do you install it directly? Through nvm? Which version? Claude Code needed 18+, but the current LTS was different, and if you got that wrong, nothing worked.
Once Node.js was in, you had to run npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code. This sounds simple. It frequently wasn’t. Permission errors. Path issues. The package would install but the claude command wouldn’t be found. I spent probably an hour just getting the command to resolve.
Then authentication, which was the part that almost stopped me. At the time, Claude Code required either API credits (prepay $30+ and burn through them fast) or — and this was just becoming available — a Claude Max subscription. The Max plan had only just started including Claude Code access in early May. I bit the bullet and upgraded, for what was essentially an experiment.
Even then, the auth flow wasn’t smooth. You ran claude in your terminal, it opened a browser, you logged in, and then… sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t recognize the subscription. Sometimes you had to reinstall the npm package entirely because the auth token got cached wrong. The subreddits were full of people hitting the same walls. “Signed up for the $200 plan just to find Claude Code doesn’t work on Windows or WSL” was a real post with real pain behind it.
After about four hours of wrestling with installation, PATH variables and authentication, I finally had a working Claude Code terminal session. I navigated to a project directory. I typed a prompt. And the thing just… started coding.
Not generating a code block for me to copy and paste. Not suggesting changes I’d need to apply by hand. It read my existing files. It understood the project structure. It created new files. It ran commands. It caught its own errors, debugged them, and fixed them — without me asking. I watched my terminal scroll with purposeful activity and realized I was seeing something fundamentally different from anything I’d used before.
Replit was great at building from scratch within its own environment. Claude Code was great at building within your existing environment. It could see what you already had. It could understand your file structure, your dependencies, your patterns. And it worked at the speed of thought — not at the speed of switching between a chat window and an editor.
That Saturday afternoon I built more functional software than I’d built in the previous two weeks on Replit. Not because Replit was bad. Because the ceiling was different.
A few things became clear that weekend.
The barrier to entry was a filter. The difficulty of installation meant that the people using Claude Code in May 2025 were self-selected for persistence and genuine interest. The subreddits, Discord servers and forums were full of people troubleshooting each other’s setups — not casual tourists. That made for a community that was genuinely helpful and technically engaged.
The gap between “AI chatbot” and “AI agent” was enormous. I’d been using Claude, ChatGPT and others in their chat interfaces for over two years. That’s a fundamentally different experience from having an AI that can read your filesystem, execute commands and modify your project in real time. The chat window is asking someone for directions. The agent is having someone ride with you and navigate.
And this was going to get easier, fast. The installation friction was a temporary artifact of a research preview becoming a product. The underlying capability — an AI that lives in your development environment and builds alongside you — was too powerful to stay locked behind a command-line gauntlet forever.
Since that weekend, I’ve used Claude Code nearly every day. It’s become the foundational tool in how I build, prototype and ship. The installation has gotten dramatically easier — there’s a VS Code extension now, the auth just works, and the Max subscription is straightforward. Anthropic took Claude Code out of preview on May 22 and shipped beta extensions for VS Code and JetBrains the same day, with its proposed edits appearing inline in your files.
But I wanted to capture what those first hours felt like, because I think the experience of arriving at a powerful tool matters. The struggle to get it running made me pay attention to what it could actually do. If it had been a one-click install, I might have kicked the tires and moved on. Instead, I’d invested four hours of my Saturday just to get it working — and that investment made me determined to understand what I now had in my hands.
If you’ve been curious about AI-assisted coding but haven’t jumped in yet: the barrier is lower now. Much lower. But the capability is just as transformative as it was that weekend in May.
The gap between people who build with AI and people who just talk about AI is widening. Every month it matters a little more which side you’re on.
