What This Course Actually Covers (and Isn't)

Quick disambiguation before anything else, since AI-in-your-IDE has become a crowded space: this course is about running Claude Code — Anthropic's agentic coding tool — inside Visual Studio, the IDE. It is not about GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's own AI coding assistant (a different product, from a different company, with a different pricing model). This platform is built around Claude, and this is the course on using it the way our own developers actually do — Visual Studio as the IDE, Claude Code as the agent doing the work alongside you.

Claude Code is a terminal-based, agentic coding tool. Unlike an autocomplete-style assistant that suggests the next few lines as you type, Claude Code works more like a capable developer you direct: you describe a task in plain English, and it reads your codebase, plans an approach, writes and edits files, runs commands, and iterates — all from a conversation in your terminal.

It runs in Visual Studio's own integrated terminal — no separate app to juggle. Visual Studio has a terminal panel built in (View → Terminal). Claude Code runs there like any other CLI tool, right alongside your solution, so you never leave the IDE to use it.

The Claude CLI is the same tool, same install — "Claude Code" is its name, claude is the command. You'll see both terms used interchangeably in Anthropic's own documentation and in this course; there's no separate product hiding behind the second name.

What this course is not

It's not about GitHub Copilot — a genuinely different tool, made by a different company, with a different interaction model (inline completions first, agent features layered on) and its own separate pricing.
It's not a full software-engineering course — this platform's Developer Path and dedicated Claude Code Pro track go much deeper into professional workflows. This is specifically about getting Claude Code running well inside Visual Studio.
It's not going to replace code review, testing, or your own judgment about what ships — same rule as every AI coding tool.

▶️ Before the next lesson

If you don't already have Claude Code installed, install it now (Anthropic's docs walk through this per platform) and open Visual Studio's integrated terminal (View → Terminal) so the next lesson's examples are things you can try immediately.