20 minutes on the clock, starting now.
It is worth being precise about what those 20 minutes buy, because it is not 20 minutes to become technical. It is 20 minutes to get Claude Code installed on your own machine, signed in, and answering one harmless question. Then you stop, and you read one more thing before you let it near anything that matters.
The direct answer, if that is all you came for. How to install Claude Code: check you are on a paid Claude plan, because the free plan does not include it. Then open your terminal, run Anthropic's one-line install command for your operating system, type claude, and sign in. The Mac command and the Windows command are both below, each in its own copy box, so you cannot paste two at once by accident.
Now the honest part. 20 minutes is the good case: a laptop you own, a paid Claude account, and a download that behaves. The bad case is not a slower install. The bad case is a machine that will not let you, and there is a section below that tells you to stop, with nothing lost and no hard feelings.
One assumption before the clock runs. This post takes it that you have already read what Claude Code actually is and why it is not cheating, and that you have decided you want the thing working. We are not going to re-argue it here.
Before the clock starts, check your plan
Here is the fact that will cost you an evening if nobody says it out loud first. Claude Code is not included on the free Claude plan. No install command changes that, and you will get all the way to signing in before you find out.
Every paid plan does include it. As at August 2026, Anthropic's pricing page lists Claude Code on Pro, on Max, on Teams (both the Standard and the Premium seat), and on Enterprise, whether self-serve or through their sales team. The free tier is the only one it is missing from.
We are not printing prices here, and there is a reason beyond tidiness. Anthropic publishes in USD and does not publish an AUD price list at all, which matters when the charge lands on your card. That whole picture, for every tool in this series, sits in what these tools actually cost.
There is a second route in, an Anthropic Console API key or one of the big cloud providers, where you pay per token consumed rather than a monthly subscription. Different animal, different bill, and not this post. If you are on a subscription, your Claude Code use draws on the allowance your plan already includes.
What you need before you type anything
Short list, all of it from Anthropic's own setup documentation.
- A supported operating system. macOS 13.0 or later. Windows 10 build 1809 or later, or Windows Server 2019 or later. Linux is supported too, though this post covers Mac and Windows.
- 4 GB of RAM or more, on an x64 or ARM64 processor. Any machine bought in the last few years clears this without thinking about it.
- An internet connection. It is not a local program that works on a plane.
- Node.js 22 or later, but only if you use the npm install path. If that sentence meant nothing to you, good. You do not need it, and the commands below do not use it.
If you do not know your macOS version, it is in the Apple menu under About This Mac. On Windows it is in Settings, under System, then About.
One more thing that is not on Anthropic's list and should be. If your laptop is managed by an employer's IT policy, or it is a shared machine at a reception desk, the wall you hit will be theirs rather than Claude Code's. Worth knowing now rather than at minute 14.
How to install Claude Code on a Mac
Every install command in this post is Anthropic's own, copied from their setup page. If you find a longer or cleverer one on a forum, do not run it.
Step one. Open Terminal. Press Cmd and Space together, type Terminal, press Enter. You get a plain window with text in it. Nothing here asks you to understand that window, only to paste into it.
Step two. Paste this, press Enter, and wait.
What you should see if it worked: progress lines while it downloads, then the window hands you back an empty prompt with no error sitting at the bottom of it.
What it looks like when it has not worked: the last thing printed is an error, and when you type claude in a moment, your Mac tells you it has never heard of that word. We are deliberately not printing exact error text for you to match against, because those strings change and a wrong one sends you chasing a problem you do not have. The real test is the one in the first-run section: does claude start, or not?
Step two, the alternative. If you already use Homebrew and would rather install this way:
Anthropic labels the Homebrew route as needing manual updates, and labels the script above as the recommended install. Pick one, not both. If you do not already know what Homebrew is, use the script and move on.
How to install Claude Code on Windows
Read this section on its own. Do not mix it with the Mac steps above, because a half-Mac, half-Windows list is how people end up pasting the wrong line.
Step one. Open PowerShell. Start menu, type PowerShell, open it.
Step two. Paste this, press Enter, and wait.
What you should see if it worked: progress lines while it downloads, then a quiet prompt with no error sitting under it.
What it looks like when it has not worked: an error at the end, and claude not recognised as a command in the next step.
If your machine gives you Command Prompt instead of PowerShell, Anthropic publishes a version for that. It reads like three commands joined together, and it is meant to. Paste it exactly as it is here, all on one line:
If you already use WinGet, this is the equivalent, and like Homebrew it needs manual updates:
One Windows detail worth knowing. Anthropic recommends installing Git for Windows so that Claude Code can use its Bash tool, and says that without it, Claude Code uses PowerShell instead. So it is a preference rather than a blocker. We are not handing you a Git command, because the only install commands in this post are Anthropic's own; if you want that step, read it on Anthropic's setup page and follow their instructions rather than ours.
If it has gone wrong by now, stopping here is a completely reasonable outcome
Read this section even if your install worked, because someone you know will need it.
If you are four steps in and the machine is fighting you, stop. Not "come back to it tonight". Stop. A locked-down work laptop, an operating system three versions behind, a permissions error you did not cause, a company device policy written by someone who has never met you: none of those are things this post can fix, and none of them are a verdict on you.
Here is the part that matters. Nothing in the first two levels of this series needed any of this. Not one thing.
The 20 prompts that reclaim a groomer's evening run in a browser tab. So does teaching it your prices, policies, and voice once, and so does the plain-English glossary that makes the rest of this series readable. A reader who never installs a thing and works through those two levels properly is further ahead than most of this industry.
Two things are worth two more minutes each before you close the tab, and then genuinely stop.
One. If your machine already has Node.js 22 or later on it, there is a third install path:
Two. Claude Code also exists as a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, downloadable from Anthropic's own download page, and it runs in a web interface at claude.ai/code for anyone on a paid plan. We are not going to tell you those are the same experience as having it on your own files, because we can only tell you they exist. What each one reaches is worth checking on Anthropic's own setup page before you invest another evening.
And if none of that lands, close the tab. This series has 30 other posts and most of them do not need a terminal.
Your first run, and the one thing to type
Still with us. Type this, in the same window:
What logging in looks like. The first run asks you to sign in and connect it to the Claude account you checked at the start. We are not drawing you the screens, because sign-in flows get redesigned and a stale screenshot is worse than no screenshot; if that step misbehaves, Anthropic's setup documentation is where to check it. What you are looking for at the end of it is a prompt sitting in your terminal, waiting for you to type in plain English.
Then type one thing, and make it a question rather than a job. Something that asks and changes nothing:
If you get back a sensible description of the folder your terminal happened to be sitting in, the install worked. That is the entire test, and you can close the window on it.
Two notes on that answer. Whatever folder you were in is the folder it could see, which does not matter when you are asking a question and matters enormously the moment you start handing out jobs. And out of the box it asks you before it edits a file or runs a command. That behaviour is a setting, not a promise, which brings us to the only instruction in this post that is not optional.
Read the permissions post next, before you point this at anything real
This is a firm recommendation, not a suggestion, and it is the last thing the 20 minutes buys you.
Do not give this tool a job on your actual files until you have read what to allow it to do and what never to. The settings that decide what it may do without asking you first are the single most consequential thing about running it on your own machine, and that post is the only one in this series that covers them. Reading it takes less time than the install did.
While you are at it, the never-paste list applies here exactly as it does in a chat window. The laptop your business runs on is also the laptop your client list lives on, and this tool can read files.
Then, and only then, the three real jobs to give it in your first hour is where the useful part starts.
What this actually reclaims for you
Take Steph, a two-groomer salon in Sydney's Inner West. She is a worked example we follow through this series, and her numbers are the sort you would recognise rather than a real client's books. Her admin lands in two evenings a week, two hours each.
So here is the trade, and it is the only arithmetic in this post. 20 minutes today, once. Two hours is what one of those evenings costs her, every week, twice.
The install has to give back 20 minutes of a single evening, one sixth of one of them, to have broken even. Everything after that is hers.
That is a considerably better bet than most things you will be sold this year. It is also not automatic: what you get out of it is the next two posts' work, in that order, permissions before jobs.