Two steps, in this order. Move into your project. Start the agent.
cd todo-app
claude
That is it. The session opens in the same terminal window, and you type in plain English.
The folder is the point
Claude Code works on the folder you started it in. Everything inside is fair game; everything outside is not there as far as it is concerned.
Start it in your home folder and you have pointed a coding agent at your entire home folder — your downloads, your other projects, everything. Start it in the project and it sees the project.
A two-second check
Before you launch, run ls. If what prints looks like your project, you are in the right place. If it looks like your life, you are not.
Do that now in the terminal below: move into todo-app, list what is inside, then start the session.
Quick check
You want to work on `~/work/api`, but you are sitting in `~`. What do you do?
What you see when it starts
A prompt, waiting for you. You type a request the way you would say it to a colleague:
explain what app.js does
It reads the file and answers. No special syntax, no keywords, no prompt formula. If your sentence would make sense to a person who has your project open, it will make sense here.
Your first turn should read, not write
The temptation is to open a session and immediately ask for a feature. Resist it for one turn.
Ask it to explain something you already understand. Now you have a free, zero-risk test of whether it actually sees what you think it sees. If the explanation is wrong, nothing has been damaged, and you have learned something important before it touched a file.
Ending and coming back
You leave a session the way you leave any terminal program, and the conversation is saved. Claude Code can continue your most recent conversation or resume an earlier one, so a session survives you closing the laptop.
Sessions are not permanent storage, though. Anything that must survive — a decision, a convention, a command that has to be run — belongs in a file in the project. That is level 3.
Before your first real edit
Make sure the project is in and your work is committed. Not because the agent is reckless, but because “undo” is a solved problem in Git and an unsolved problem in a terminal. You are two lessons away from letting it change files.
Can it see files outside the folder I started in?
Do I need a special project structure?
Try it yourself
Your first message in a fresh session.