A Post-it is stuck to the side of her monitor, three lines on it, in the order she would actually do them.
Take Steph, a two-groomer salon in Sydney's Inner West. She is a worked example we follow through this series rather than a real client's books. That Post-it is not a beginner's list. It is a better first hour than most people give themselves.
The direct answer. Claude Code getting started is a question about order, not ambition. Give it a job that only looks and reports, then one that creates a new file without touching what exists, and only then one that changes a file you already had, with you watching. An hour covers all three, on a file you exported yourself.
The order matters because of how this goes wrong. You are curious, so you point it at something big: the whole camera roll, a year of bookings, the folder with everything in it. It does something you did not expect, you can't tell whether the damage is real or imagined, and the window gets closed. That is how a tool gets installed once and never opened again.
This post assumes the thing is already running on your machine. If it is not, the honest install guide asks for 20 minutes and comes first.
Claude Code getting started: why the first job has to be too small
A read-only job is one that looks and reports and changes nothing. No file created, no file edited, no file moved. It is the safest possible first move, and the one almost everybody skips.
Skipping it is expensive, because what you are buying in the first ten minutes is not output. It is evidence: that it can genuinely see the files on your machine rather than talk about them in the abstract, and that you can read what it says it is doing and follow along. Trust costs nothing to build while nothing is at risk, and a great deal afterwards.
It is also checkable in ten seconds. It hands you a list of file names, you glance at the folder yourself, and either they match or they do not. You can't check a big job you didn't watch.
As it comes, it reads without asking you and asks before it changes a file or runs a command. So a looking job runs quietly, and jobs two and three will interrupt you. That difference is the shape of the whole hour.
What the first hour actually feels like
It is slower and chattier than you expect. Both are the point.
It will ask your permission repeatedly. Past job one you will be answering yes or no more than you expected. That is not sluggishness. Each prompt is the only place you get to say no, so read them rather than clicking through.
It narrates. Long stretches of text about which file it is opening and what it found. Skim it. You're not expected to understand every line, only to notice if it is somewhere it should not be.
It will be confidently wrong at some point. Anthropic's own documentation says so plainly: confident-sounding wrong answers remain possible. It will not hedge and it will not slow down, which is why the 10-second check in why it gets things wrong earns more here than in a chat window.
And it cannot see anything you have not shown it. Everything it can see is the folder you point it at, which in a first hour means one folder and nothing else on the machine.
Which means job two needs a file. In Petboost that is a CSV, either a Quick Export from Customers and Pets or the Export Your Data screen under Billing, and only an Admin or Owner Admin can run them. Whatever you use, the export lands in your downloads folder, and that file is the entire connection. Nothing is plugged into anything.
Job one: look, and change nothing
Make one folder to work in first. Call it Salon, put it in your home folder, and drop the export inside. That is ~/Salon on a Mac and C:\Users\<your name>\Salon on Windows. Later posts use the same folder, so name it now.
Type this and press enter.
What you should see. The full path of the folder it looked in, a list of file names, a count, and the column headings printed out. It may not ask you for anything at all, because looking is the one thing it does without asking.
How you know it worked. Open the same folder yourself and compare. Names match, count matches, headings match the top row of your export. Ten seconds, and you now know something you did not: it can read your things.
If it did something you did not expect, the likely cause is that it looked in the wrong folder, because it starts wherever the window happened to be. Tell it where.
Job two: make something new, beside the old thing
Now something you can use, that still cannot touch what you already had. It reads the export and writes a brand new file beside it.
The last half is the load-bearing part. Invented numbers in a report are worse than no report, so you are making it show its working before the arithmetic, and leave a hole where a hole exists.
What you should see. The column mapping and the status values first. Then a request for permission to create the file. Say yes. Then the summary, printed out so you can read it without opening anything.
How you know it worked. Take the busiest day, find that day's completed rows in the export, and add the prices up on a calculator. It must match to the cent. Then check week-summary.md exists and the CSV's modified date has not changed. Do that the first three times.
If the numbers are wrong, it is nearly always the statuses. Every booking system words them differently, and it has guessed which ones mean the dog was actually on the table.
Before job three, go and read the permissions post
Job three changes a file. Everything up to here could not.
There is a setting that decides how much this tool does without asking you first, and it is the most consequential thing about running it on the machine your business lives on. What to allow it to do, and what never to is the only post in this series that covers those settings. Read it before you change a single one. Today, change nothing: the way it arrived is the way you want it for job three.
Two lines from the never list stop being general advice at this point and start doing real work:
And never let it:
The second line is most of your safety at this level, and job three is built around it.
Job three: change one small thing, while you watch
Pick the smallest messy file you own: your price list. Typed at different times, some prices with a dollar sign and some without, sizes described three different ways.
What you should see. It makes the copy first and asks you before it does. Then it shows you the change it proposes to make to prices.txt. Read that properly; this is the moment the hour has been building to. Then say yes.
How you know it worked. Open both files side by side. Pick your three most-booked services and confirm the price is identical in each. Count the services in the new file against the old one. If a number moved anywhere, that is your answer, and you have an untouched copy sitting right there.
If it did something you did not expect, you already have your undo, because you asked for it in the same breath as the job.
It keeps checkpoints of its own that let you rewind, a genuine safety net. The copy you asked for first is better, because you can see it with your own eyes in your own folder.
And here is what to notice while it works. It will ask you things it should not have to ask.
What "med" means in kilograms. Whether the puppy first groom is its own service. Whether the de-matting surcharge is a flat $30.
Every one of those is something you would explain to a new groomer in her first week, and you are about to type it out for the third time.
The two things to type when it goes sideways
Keep these two in your head. At some point you will want them and won't want to be composing a sentence.
Then, if the answer is not what you wanted:
Files are recoverable. What has already left your computer is not, and none of the three jobs above asks it to send, charge, or publish anything. That is not an accident.
Where getting started with Claude Code leads next
Two posts follow from this hour, in a fixed order. The permissions post comes before you widen anything at all. Then the thing job three made obvious: it does not know your prices, your sizes, or your policies, and you are tired of typing them out. That is what a memory file for your business is, and it is the natural next step.
After that the jobs get bigger honestly rather than recklessly. The shoebox problem is 4,000 photos and a folder of receipts. Teaching it a job once so it runs the same way forever is where the real return sits, and it only works because you spent this hour learning to read what it says it is doing. If a word in any of that was unfamiliar, the plain English glossary has them all.
What this actually reclaims for you
One hour, once, for all three jobs.
Job two is the one to price. Say Steph's weekly add-up takes her 20 minutes: pulling the export, tallying the days, working out what the no-shows cost her. That is a worked example rather than a measured figure, and deliberately the modest version, because plenty of owners never do it at all and simply guess.
Twenty minutes a week, across the 48 weeks she actually trades, is 16 hours. The hour she spent today breaks even in week three, and everything after that is hers.
Doing the small jobs first is not caution for its own sake. It is that you cannot hand a job over to something you have never watched work.
Next, in order: the permissions post, then giving it a memory.