I Took Anthropic's Claude Code Course. Here's What Actually Matters.
I recently completed the Claude Code in Action course on Anthropic's Skilljar platform. Wanted to share an honest take because most posts I see about it are either hype or vague praise with no substance.
##What the course actually covers
The course is 21 lessons covering how Claude Code works under the hood, its tool use system, context management, custom commands, MCP servers, GitHub integration, and hooks. There's a solid chunk dedicated to hooks alone (5 lessons), which honestly surprised me. If you've been using Claude Code without hooks or custom commands, that section alone makes it worth your time.
It also does a decent job explaining the architecture of how coding assistants interact with your codebase through tools. Not how Claude "thinks" exactly, but how it reads files, chains tools together, and manages context across a session. Understanding that changed how I prompt it.
##What I wish it covered more
It doesn't spend any time on failure modes, hallucination handling, or guardrails for production. That's a gap. If you're shipping code that Claude touched, you need to think about that stuff, and the course won't help you there.
The CLAUDE.md file deserves way more attention than it gets. There's a couple lessons on adding and controlling context, but no deep-dive on how to actually structure a good CLAUDE.md. Once I started putting project conventions, tech stack preferences, and common patterns in mine, the quality of responses jumped noticeably. It's like giving your pair programmer the onboarding doc on day one instead of making them figure things out from scratch every session. Anthropic's own engineering blog goes deeper on this than the course does.
##Build an iterative project brain
This is probably the most useful thing I've started doing that the course doesn't teach you.
Beyond the CLAUDE.md, I maintain a separate markdown file that acts as a running project brain. Every session, I update it with what happened. Coding style decisions and the reasoning behind them. Bugs we tracked down and their root causes. Patterns the agent kept getting wrong until I corrected it. Architecture decisions and the tradeoffs we weighed.
The idea is simple. The agent has no memory between sessions. So you build it one. Instead of re-explaining your codebase philosophy every time, you point it at a file that already has the full picture. It knows that we tried approach X and it broke because of Y. It knows we landed on Z naming convention and why. It knows not to do that thing it did three sessions ago because we already figured out it doesn't work.
It turns Claude from a stranger you onboard every morning into a teammate who was there yesterday. The more you feed into it, the less time you waste going in circles. After a few weeks of this, the quality gap between session one and session twenty is massive.
##How I actually use it
The course positions Claude Code as an autonomous agent you delegate work to. That's the official angle. My take is different.
I don't treat Claude Code as "write this for me." I write the code first. Then I ask Claude to review it, question my assumptions, and poke holes in my logic. The real value for me has been using it to explore edge cases I'd miss because I'm too close to the code. Things like "what happens if this input is null" or "what are the failure modes here." It catches stuff I wouldn't think to check because I already have assumptions baked in.
It's basically pair programming without the social overhead. You can dump half-formed ideas into it, say "what am I missing here" and get back something useful.
If you write tests, this might be the highest ROI use case. Having Claude reason about test coverage and suggest edge cases you hadn't considered is incredibly useful. It doesn't replace thinking about your tests, but it adds a layer you probably weren't doing consistently on your own.
##Who gets the most out of it
If you're a mid to senior dev who's been using Claude Code but feels like there's more under the hood you're not tapping into, this course is for you. Same goes if you've been prompting LLMs without really understanding the tool use architecture underneath, or if you haven't touched hooks, custom commands, or MCP servers yet. That's where the real leverage is, and the course does a solid job surfacing it.