1 Meet Claude
This chapter covers
- Defining and using Claude
- Working through the three phases of the book
- Realising gains: productivity, capability, creativity
- Understanding tokens, context, models, and plans
- Setting expectations for working with AI
- Your first critical dialogue with Claude
You don’t need to read a book about AI. You ask AI a question and it answers. You tell AI to do something and it does it. There isn’t much more. So why pick up this book about AI? Because — and you know this — there really is much more. I work with a lot of engineers in different organizations, and very few are making use of AI to truly transform how they work. Get it right and you can use Claude all day every day, to streamline every aspect of what you do. If you’re not there yet, or you’re just getting started, or you’re still using AI as a glorified search engine: then welcome to Claude at Work.
This book is about supercharging your own work with Claude, the family of tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) made by Anthropic. Claude is an AI assistant that behaves like a new joiner on your team who knows everything. Actually everything: every programming language, every tool, every open-source project, every API. But they have no real-world experience, no understanding of your systems, and they won’t do any work unless you explicitly tell them to get going. Claude has huge potential but it’s down to you to realize it, and for that you need to build a good working relationship.