My First Steps with Claude Code: An Honest Account

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I will be honest – I have been putting off getting into AI-assisted development for a while. I am not new to building things. I have been running Code and Visual for nearly two decades. But the idea of learning yet another tool, especially one that lives in a command line interface I have never been particularly comfortable with, felt like more friction than it was worth.

Then I tried Claude Code. And I had a lot of questions.

Starting With the Basics – How Does This Thing Even Work?

The first thing I did was try voice mode. I typed /voice and suddenly I could just talk to it. Which immediately made me curious – how is that even possible in a terminal? Terminals are built for keyboard input, are they not?

Claude explained that it uses something called raw mode – a feature that has been part of operating systems for decades. When Claude Code starts, it puts the terminal input into raw mode, which means every keypress is passed directly to the running process rather than being buffered. So holding the spacebar is detected immediately, audio capture is triggered directly via OS-level APIs, and the terminal itself does not need to know any of this is happening.

I did not know that. I thought terminals were more locked down than that. Turns out they are not – they just do not advertise their flexibility.

Then I asked what stdin meant, because I have seen the term forever and never properly understood it. Claude explained it simply: stdin is just the default channel a process uses to receive input. There is also stdout for output and stderr for errors. Three channels, always there, going back to Unix in the 1970s. Sometimes you just need someone to explain the obvious thing clearly.

Can I Actually Do Real Work From the CLI?

My next question was whether the CLI was actually practical for real work, or whether I would always need an IDE alongside it. I was half expecting to be told I needed a GUI.

Instead, Claude just opened my website. I gave it the URL for codeandvisual.com.au and it launched the browser directly from the terminal. One command. That was a small thing but it shifted my thinking – the CLI is not a limitation, it is just a different surface.

Then We Started Digging Into My Website

I asked Claude to look at the metadata on my homepage and give me an SEO read. What came back was interesting – and not entirely accurate at first.

It initially told me I had 13 H1 tags on the page. That did not sound right to me. I pushed back. Claude reconsidered and admitted that its first analysis had been pulling CSS class names called h1 rather than actual HTML elements. When it searched the raw HTML properly, there was only one genuine H1 element: Creative Digital and Web Design Agency, Sydney. Which was correct.

What I appreciated was that Claude acknowledged the mistake and explained why it happened rather than doubling down. However, it is something of concern to be aware of, it was unequivocal originally, even though it was wrong.

The Metadata Needed Work Though

The more interesting finding was my Open Graph title. It was set to Home. A WordPress default I had never updated. Every time someone shares my page on LinkedIn, the preview title just says Home. Not great.

We went through my portfolio page too – Claude fetched it and built up a picture of what Code and Visual actually does. The observation it made was sharp: my metadata was positioning us purely as a web design agency, but the portfolio showed AR, VR, games, apps, eLearning, and campaigns for brands like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and WWF. That is a lot to leave out of your description.

We debated the copy back and forth. I pushed back on dropping award-winning. I questioned whether creative digital agency was actually searchable. Claude adjusted each time, and we landed on something that felt genuinely representative:

Award-winning Sydney web design agency delivering websites, apps, games, AR/VR and digital campaigns for ambitious brands since 2007.

Better. More honest. More complete.

Then Things Got Interesting – The REST API

I asked whether Claude could just log into my WordPress backend and make the changes directly. It cannot navigate a GUI login form. But it could use the WordPress REST API – and it confirmed the API was active on my site with a single command.

We generated an application password in WordPress – a built-in feature I had not used before that generates a one-time credential you can revoke immediately after. Claude started making authenticated API calls, found my homepage post ID, explored what was writable, and pulled back my custom post types – all 9 of them – mapping out what was and was not accessible.

Yoast per-page SEO fields turned out not to be writable via the API without extra configuration. WCK custom fields the same. Both fixable with a small snippet in functions.php, which Claude provided. But the point was made: the CLI, with the right credentials, can reach directly into a live WordPress installation and do real work.

As a final touch I also asked it to put in restrictions to access to the REST API Just so writing this article didn’t expose me to increased interest from malicious actors.

And Then I Asked It to Write This

We had been talking for a while. I was starting to get a feel for how to use this tool – not as something that replaces thinking, but as something that fills in the gaps. The technical gaps (how does raw mode work?), the knowledge gaps (what is stdin?), and the execution gaps (can you just make that API call for me?).

So I asked Claude to write a blog post about our session. From my perspective. In my voice. Covering the questions I actually asked, the answers I actually got, and the moments where I pushed back and it adjusted.

And then, as the final beat, to acknowledge that the very article you are reading right now was written by Claude – drafted and published directly to this WordPress site via the REST API – as the first real test case of what we could build together.

This is that post.

It is a strange loop. But it felt like the right way to mark the beginning of something.

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