Set Up Your Machine

Nothing in this lab is clever. It is the twenty minutes that decides whether the next three hours are about building software or about why nothing works.

Every step below ends with a command that prints something. If it prints, that install is real. If it does not print, you have a specific problem with a specific fix, and this page has it.

Three installs, one account, and your agent is not on the list

You are installing Node, git and VS Code, and creating a GitHub account. That is the whole bench. The agent comes in Lab 01, and it is deliberately not here.

Claude Code’s own setup docs are blunt about why: the native installer works on Windows 10 1809 or newer with 4 GB of RAM, and needs no admin rights, no WSL and no Node.js at all (setup). There is even a desktop app whose Code tab needs no terminal (desktop quickstart).

So none of this is for the agent. It is for your project. The QAIRU Event Sign-up app you build across this course needs Node to run, git to remember what changed, and an editor so you can read what the agent wrote.

Where the terminal lives, and which one you have

A terminal is a window that runs commands. You need one open before anything else.

• Windows — press Start, type terminal, open Windows Terminal. Do not have it? Type powershell instead, or install it with winget install Microsoft.WindowsTerminal. It is free and open source (microsoft/terminal), and later you will want its split panes: Alt+Shift+D puts the agent on the left and the logs on the right.
• macOS — Cmd+Space, type terminal, Enter.
• Linux — Ctrl+Alt+T on most desktops.

Now read the line where your cursor sits. On Windows it tells you which shell you are in, and pasting a command into the wrong one is a standard first-hour failure — Anthropic’s own docs list the two error messages it produces (setup).

Install it, then prove it

1. Install Node — and npm arrives with it

   Go to the official Node.js download page and take the LTS build for your operating system: the .msi installer on Windows, the .pkg installer on macOS, or the instructions that page gives for your distribution on Linux. Accept the defaults.

   LTS means long-term support: the boring version, which is the one you want. Anything from version 20 up works here. Take the newest LTS anyway — if you ever install Claude Code through npm instead of its native installer, that route wants Node.js 22 or newer (setup).

   Then close the terminal you had open and open a new one. Not superstition: it is the single most common reason a fresh install looks broken. A running terminal keeps the environment it started with and never notices an installer changing it.

   check

   > node -v
   v22.20.0
   
   > npm -v
   10.9.3

   Your numbers will be different and probably higher. What matters is the shape: node -v answers with a v and digits, and npm -v answers with digits. npm is the package manager that comes bundled with Node — you do not install it separately.

2. Install git

   Windows: download and run Git for Windows. Take the defaults. Anthropic’s docs call this optional for Claude Code and then recommend it anyway: with Git for Windows present, Claude Code uses Git Bash for its Bash tool; without it, it falls back to a PowerShell tool (setup). You need git from Lab 02 regardless, so install it now.

   macOS: run git --version. If git is missing, macOS offers to install the developer command line tools — accept, wait, run the command again.

   Linux (Debian/Ubuntu): sudo apt install git.

   check

   > git --version
   git version 2.51.0

   Again: the exact number is not the point. The words git version followed by digits are.

3. Install VS Code and open a folder with it

   VS Code is a free editor, open source at its core (microsoft/vscode). Download the build for your operating system from Microsoft and install it, or on Windows run winget install Microsoft.VisualStudioCode.

   Then do the one thing that actually matters: File → Open Folder, and pick a folder. Not a file — a folder. Everything in this course, and everything an agent does, is scoped to a folder. If you open loose files instead, nothing else in the course will line up.

4. Make the folder you will live in for the rest of the course

   One project, one folder. Not the Desktop, not your home directory — a folder with a name.

   powershellCopy

   cd $HOME\Documents
   mkdir qairu-event
   cd qairu-event

   bashCopy

   cd ~/Documents
   mkdir qairu-event
   cd qairu-event

   If you chain those onto one line, PowerShell separates commands with ; and Bash with && — the same split behind two of the error messages in the next section.

   This matters more than it looks. Launching an agent in your home folder or on the Desktop hands it every file you own to read and index. cd into the project first, every time.

5. Prove all of it in one fresh terminal

   In a terminal you opened after every install, standing inside qairu-event:

   checkCopy

   node -v
   git --version

   Two version numbers, no errors. Then open this folder in VS Code — File → Open Folder, or type code . if your installer added that shortcut — and confirm you can see the (empty) file tree on the left.

   That is the whole definition of done. Two numbers and a folder.

When Windows argues back

Most of this room is on Windows; most tutorials are written by people who are not. Read the message instead of retrying the command. Every row below comes from Anthropic’s setup and install troubleshooting pages, and every one generalises past Claude Code to almost anything you install this year.

The accounts to make tonight

All four of these cost zero and none of them asks for a card.

Two honest notes before you budget anything.

Kazakhstan is on Anthropic’s supported-countries list for both Claude.ai and the API (supported countries), so no VPN is needed. But the free Claude plan does not include Claude Code — that needs Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise or Console billing (setup). Pro is $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually (pricing). One month covers this masterclass.

And “student plan” does not mean “the same product, free”. GitHub’s pack gives Copilot Student, not Copilot Pro. Students can no longer pick GPT-5.3-Codex, GPT-5.4, Claude Opus or Claude Sonnet by hand — those models are reachable only through Auto mode — and the plan’s allowance is 200 AI credits a month, where one credit is one cent of usage. The announcement collected 6,796 thumbs-down reactions (GitHub community discussion, Copilot plans). Free is still free; it is just smaller than the marketing implies.

Hand your setup to an AI and make it check your work

You do not have an agent yet — that is Lab 01 — but you have a chat window. Run the commands, copy the real output, and paste it with this.

I am setting up a laptop for a web development course that needs Node, npm and git.
My operating system is: [Windows 11 / macOS / Ubuntu].

Here is exactly what my terminal printed, pasted unedited:

[paste the output of: node -v]
[paste the output of: npm -v]
[paste the output of: git --version]

Do three things, in this order:
1. Tell me which of Node, npm and git are correctly installed, and which are not.
2. For anything missing or too old (I need Node 20 or higher), give me the single next
   action for my operating system. One action, not a list of options.
3. If an output is an error message rather than a version, explain in one sentence what
   that specific message means and what causes it.

Do not tell me to reinstall everything. Do not give me commands for an operating system
I did not name.

That prompt is small on purpose. Naming your OS, pasting real output instead of describing it, and closing off the “just reinstall everything” answer are three habits you will reuse on every prompt in this course.