Your first four weeks

Knowing the tools is one thing; making them a habit is another. This is your 30-day plan: four weeks, one focus per week, every line a box you can actually check off. Each item maps back to a lesson in this course, so if a step feels foggy, revisit the lesson and come back. Pace yourself however you like — the order matters more than the speed.

What you'll get: a 30-day plan with one focus per week — setup, skills, pro moves, and your capstone — every task a checkable box, plus a prompt that turns Claude into your progress tracker.

The plan, week by week

Week 1

Set up

One goal: a working setup. By the end of the week you should be able to open Claude Code, see your repo connected, and have one real session behind you. The lessons Connect GitHub and Your first session, branches & models walk through every step.

Week 2

Skills

Now the engineering workflow — adapted, with credit, from Matt Pocock's engineering workshop. Install Family A and run the full chain once on something deliberately small: an idea you can describe in two sentences. The goal isn't the output; it's feeling the rhythm of interrogate → spec → issues → build.

Install Family A (mattpocock/skills)
Run grill-me on a small idea
Run to-prd → to-issues
Build one slice with tdd

Week 3

Pro moves

These are the habits that separate casual users from pros: context that survives sessions, rules that persist, and real documents Claude builds for you. The lesson Handoff — continue in a fresh session covers the first item in detail.

Write a HANDOFF and resume in a new session
Add a CLAUDE.md with your rules
Install Family B (official skills)
Make a pptx or xlsx

Week 4

Own it

Time to make it yours. The Career tracks lesson lists the MCP connectors and skills for each path — pick one, wire it up, and ship something small but real. Then let improve-codebase-architecture critique what you built: closing with a refactor pass is what turns a demo into a foundation.

Pick your career track
Add its MCP connectors
Ship a small capstone project
Run improve-codebase-architecture on it

Let Claude keep score

You don't need a separate habit app: paste this prompt as you start Week 1 and Claude becomes your progress tracker. When you finish a week, hand it the next week's checklist.

Example prompt

Here is my week-1 checklist for this course: install Claude Code (Desktop), install Node.js, create a GitHub account and a first repo, connect GitHub in Claude, and open my first session. Ask me which items I've already completed, keep an updated checklist for me with done/pending marks, and end every reply with the single next action I should take.

Four weeks from now you won't be following a course anymore — you'll have a setup, a workflow, and a shipped project. That's the whole point.

10-minute practice. Don't wait for Monday: check off the first Week 1 box today (install Claude Code Desktop — or Node.js if you already have it). Then paste the prompt above into Claude, tell it which boxes you've already done, and keep your list alive from day one.