Beginner's Guides

Claude Desktop System Requirements (2026): Minimum & Recommended Specs

Claude Desktop was my introduction to AI and it's still the best on-ramp to useful AI at work, so in today's guide I'm taking the system-requirements question the way I'd answer it for a client: the official minimums, the September change that moved Cowork into the cloud, what still runs on your machine, and why the laptop you own is probably fine.

· mcp · system-requirements

Claude Code System Requirements (2026): Specs, Setup, Gotchas

In today's guide, we're setting up Claude Code on Mac, Windows and Linux in the forms it now ships in: the terminal CLI, the Code tab in the Claude Desktop app, and the VS Code and Cursor extension. The published spec, the install routes Anthropic recommends, Fable 5.1 on every paid plan, and why the machine matters less than the way you work.

· claude-code · cli

A beginner's guide to Claude hooks

Claude Code hooks are small scripts that fire automatically at specific moments in a coding session. They give you deterministic control where CLAUDE.md instructions only get probabilistic compliance. This beginner's guide covers what hooks do, the five events you need to know, the exit-code gotcha that catches almost everyone, and the community projects worth installing before you write your own.

· Claude · claude-code

How to Set Up a Claude Code Project in 2026 (And What Goes Where)

In today's guide we're walking through the anatomy of a proper Claude Code project - CLAUDE.md, rules, skills, agents, hooks, MCP servers and plugins - and the five-step setup I use for every new repo.

Claude Code: The Complete Beginner's Guide

In today's guide I'm sharing most of what I know about Claude Code after months of daily use - the bits that work, the bits I got spectacularly wrong, and what I wish someone had told me on day one.

Best PC for Local AI & LLMs 2026: 17 Tested Builds

In today's guide we're working through the best PCs for running local AI and LLMs, from a used RTX 3090 - the card I'd call the sensible minimum - up to Apple's new 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio. I've tested 17 builds along the way, so you'll see which hardware runs which model size, and at what tokens per second.

How to Use Firecrawl in Claude Desktop

I've spent the past few months building YubHub (launch coming soon), a job aggregator that feeds our Motorsport jobs site, fluidjobs.com. The scraper needs to pull job listings from career sites across Formula 1, automotive engineering…