About the Field Guide

What this is

An on-ramp to Anthropic's Claude Code for people who don't code and suspect the tool isn't for them. Not a marketing piece. Not a developer manual — the internet has excellent ones, written for people who already belong. This is the guide for the person standing outside the door, sure they'd embarrass themselves inside.

Who made it

L. Leon Pendarvis. Working professional, not a programmer, and — for longer than he'd like to admit — someone who avoided Claude Code like the plague purely because of the name. The word "Code" was the whole barrier: it promised terminals, jargon, and a club he wasn't in. When he finally tried it, he shipped professional multi-page websites — designed, cross-linked, search-engine ready, all versioned publicly on GitHub — without writing a line of code. This guide is the door held open for the next person standing where he stood.

What it isn't

It isn't complete, and that's deliberate. Claude Code has depths — the terminal, custom skills, integrations, multi-agent workflows — that this guide mentions only in passing, because the fastest way to lose a newcomer is to hand them the whole map on day one. When you outgrow these pages, Anthropic's own documentation is the next stop, and you'll be ready to read it.

A note on aging

Two kinds of material live on this site, and they age at different speeds. The capability snapshot — what the product looks like, which buttons exist, what plans include — ages in months; verify anything load-bearing against Anthropic's current documentation. The working method — brief outcomes, react honestly, commit before risk, review before publishing — is just craft, and craft keeps.

The family

This is one of eight field guides, each a small, focused site on one tool or method, all cross-linked in the band below. They share a design system, a house voice, and a conviction: serious tools deserve guides written by working people, in plain English, with the failures left in.

Colophon

Built with Claude Code, naturally — this site is its own demonstration. Static HTML and CSS, no frameworks, hosted from a public GitHub repository. Text licensed CC BY 4.0: quote it, teach from it, build on it, with attribution. Claude Code is a product of Anthropic; this guide has no affiliation with Anthropic and speaks only from the author's chair.