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Accounts

Two sign-ups. Mostly clicking "next." The gentlest module in the whole guide.

Before we touch your laptop’s settings, let’s get you signed up for the two services you’ll lean on the whole way through:

  1. Claude — the company that makes your AI assistant.
  2. GitHub — a free service that stores and backs up your work online.

You don’t need to understand what they do yet. Right now we’re just creating logins, the same way you’d sign up for any website.

1 · Create a Claude account

Claude is made by a company called Anthropic. Your AI assistant, Claude Code A program you talk to in plain English that writes and edits code for you, right on your computer. , signs in with this same account.

  • Open a new browser tab and go to claude.ai (opens in a new tab) .
  • Click Sign up.
  • Use your email, or click “Continue with Google” to use a Google account you already have. Either is fine — pick whichever you’ll remember.
  • Follow the prompts to confirm your email and set a password.
The Claude sign-up page. Yours may look a little different — that's fine.

That’s the account itself. It’s free to create.

2 · Create a GitHub account

GitHub A free website where your projects are stored and backed up. Think 'cloud save' for the things you build. is where your work gets backed up online. If your laptop fell in a lake, your project would still be safe on GitHub. You’ll understand it much better in Module 5 — for now we just need the login to exist.

  • Open another tab and go to github.com (opens in a new tab) .
  • Click Sign up.
  • Enter an email, a password, and a username. The username is public and shows up in your web addresses later, so pick something you’re happy to be known by — your name or a handle both work fine.
  • Confirm your email when GitHub sends you a code.
The GitHub sign-up page.

GitHub is genuinely free for what you’re doing.

A note on writing things down

Keep these somewhere you trust:

  • The email you used for Claude
  • The email and username you used for GitHub

You won’t need the passwords if your browser is remembering them, but the emails and that GitHub username will come up again, and it’s nice not to have to think.

That’s it — the boring-but-important part is behind you. Next we’ll set up your actual laptop: installing the handful of tools you’ll build with.

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