Welcome! We are delighted you are joining us for this immersive learning experience. We hope you’ll find it a rewarding investment of your time.
This “Lesson 0” delivers the map and vocabulary for the entire Crash Course: what you are about to build, how it decides what to send you, where its numbers come from and where they may be weak, what the whole thing costs, and every technical word the later lessons use.
Twenty minutes here saves an hour of confusion in Lesson 1, and it is where you learn the full cost of building the engine before you are asked to spend a dollar. Read it once, at your own pace. No need to memorize any of it; come back to this lesson whenever you like.
This is the only Claude Code Crash Course email that goes to everyone. Lessons 1 through 5 are posted to the course mailing list only. To be alerted each time a new lesson goes up, opt into the “Claude Code Crash Course” list on your account page. Full access to the course is available to paid members.
What you will be able to do
By the end of this course you will own a small program that emails you an investment idea on most working days. It runs every weekday and sends when it has something new. Each idea arrives as a one-page memo: what the company does, why it scored well against your criteria, where it looks weak, and the raw valuation numbers so you can judge for yourself.
The engine is an idea funnel for your own research, not investment advice, and not a buy list. Each email surfaces at most one candidate a day from a large global pool of ideas. Verify the engine’s assertions against the company’s own filings, as data issues are unavoidable in a limited-scope project such as this one. The data the engine draws on can be wrong or stale, and a machine that ranks numbers cannot know what you know. Treat each memo as a lead worth a bit of your time, never as a verdict.
The mental model
In this project, you are not going to write code. You are going to talk to an assistant called Claude Code, in plain English, and it writes and runs the program for you.
Two qualifications: You will read plain-text settings files, which hold your country list, your size limits, and your scoring weights, and you will either edit them yourself or ask Claude Code to edit them for you. And in Lesson 2 you will have an opportunity to hand Claude Code a list of the exact names your data provider uses for revenue, operating cash flow and the rest, because guessing those is the one thing an assistant cannot do reliably. That is closer to handing a new analyst the list of field names your data provider uses than to programming, and the lesson gives you the list. Nothing in this course asks you to write or debug a line of Python.
Picture a very capable analyst who is excellent at the computer parts. You type a request in ordinary sentences, like “only include companies above $300 million in size, and skip banks.” Claude Code does the technical work, shows you the result, and waits for your next instruction. If it is not what you wanted, you say so in plain words, and it adjusts.
You are in control at every step, and the controls are worth knowing before you need them. Claude Code has a setting called “Manual” in which it shows you each change it wants to make and waits for you to accept or reject it; Lesson 1 starts you there, and that is where you stay for this course. (Newer accounts otherwise start in a mode called “Auto,” where a second AI checks each action in the background instead of asking you. Fine later; not where to learn.) Each time you send it a request it first saves a snapshot of your files, so you can put things back the way they were before that request. You can stop it mid-task. And there is a mode, called plan mode, in which it can read and think but cannot alter anything, which is where you should start any step you are unsure about.
So the honest version of “you cannot break anything” is this: you can break things, and then put them back. On a bad day a result looks wrong, you say “that is not what I meant,” you roll back if you need to, and you try again. That is the rhythm of the whole course: plan, ask, look, check, adjust.
Two ways to use Claude Code
You have a choice to make in Lesson 1, and it is worth understanding now.
The desktop app is an ordinary application window. You type your request in a box, and in the setting this course uses, when Claude Code wants to change a file it shows you the old version and the new version side by side, with Accept and Reject buttons. It has a menu for choosing plan mode. Nothing is typed as a command. This course leads with the desktop app in every lesson, because the course is written for people who have never used a terminal.
The terminal version does exactly the same work in a plain text window. It is what you will use for a few steps in Lesson 5, when you set up the always-on computer that runs the engine each morning. Where the two differ, the lesson gives you the terminal steps in a marked box.
They share everything that matters: the same assistant, the same files, the same settings. You can switch between them, or use both. The desktop app needs a Claude Pro or Max subscription. The terminal version also runs on an API key alone (a paid account where you are billed for what you use, rather than a flat monthly subscription), which is the cheaper route if you do not want a subscription. It does mean working in a text window for every lesson, in a course written for people who have never opened one.
