Getting started with Claude for software development
January 13, 2026
2025 was an interesting year in many ways. One way in which it was interesting for me is that I went from an AI hater to a pretty big user. And so I’ve had a few requests for a “using Claude” guide, so I figure new year, why not give it a shot? The lack of this kind of content was something that really frustrated me starting out, so feels like a good thing to contribute to the world.
If, like it seems, a lot of people did over the holiday period, you gave some serious thought to working with an Agentic coding system like Claude Code. This could be a really good introduction for you. I highly recommend it. I highly recommend getting a 20 US account with Claude, giving you access to Code. I highly recommend you download the desktop app and work with it that way. At that price point, you will likely run out of tokens from time to time and have to wait an hour or two while working with it, but you can still get a tremendous amount of valuable work done. If you’re a software engineer, I think now it really is the time to be working with these tools.
