A teaching curriculum for interns at The Software Dojo. Learn to work with Claude Code the way TurtleWolfe works with Claude Code — Docker-first, spec-first, and terminal-orchestrated.
This repo does not teach you Claude Code itself. It teaches you a workflow for building real software with an AI pair programmer, using conventions that have survived 20+ production repos.
- New interns at TSD who have Claude Code installed but don't know what to do with it on Day 1
- Developers who've used Claude Code for scripts and want to adopt it for real feature work
- Mentors who want a single link to hand new hires instead of repeating the same onboarding conversation
Every intern shows up with the same three questions. This repo answers them in order:
- How do I start a new repo with AI? → Chapter 01
- How do I give Claude context so it's actually useful? → Chapter 02
- What slash commands do I use, and when? → Chapter 03
Everything else is advanced material you grow into.
Each chapter follows the same shape:
- Day-1 minimum — the first two pages. Read this, do the exercise, you're productive.
- Dig deeper — the rest of the chapter. Come back to it when you have questions.
- Exercise — a 15-minute hands-on task. Success = a real artifact sitting in your repo.
Chapters are independent. You can read 03 before 02 if you're in a hurry. But the exercises build on each other.
| # | Chapter | Day-1 question | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00 | Start Here | "Is my setup even working?" | 15 min |
| 01 | Bootstrap a Repo | "How do I start a new project?" | 15 min |
| 02 | Give It Context | "Why does Claude keep missing obvious things?" | 30 min |
| 03 | Slash Commands | "How do I stop typing the same prompt 20 times?" | 30 min |
| 04 | The SpecKit Loop | "How do I ship a whole feature without getting lost?" | 60 min |
| 05 | Advanced Orchestration | "Can I run 27 terminals in parallel?" (Level 3 / Optional) | 2+ hours |
Plus principles/ — the why behind every rule, one file per principle, one war story each.
Chapter 01's exercise has you clone hello-world-ai (a companion repo) as a starting point instead of bootstrapping from zero. It's a minimal Next.js + Docker setup with the 10-command starter kit already installed at .claude/commands/. First commit: under 15 minutes from git clone to docker compose up to a shipped change.
Note:
hello-world-ailives at~/repos/hello-world-aion the machine that produced this curriculum. Ask your mentor for the current clone URL.
- Not a Claude Code tutorial. It assumes you've run
/helpat least once. If you haven't, read Anthropic's docs first. - Not a generic SpecKit guide. SpecKit has its own docs. This repo teaches how the TSD workflow uses SpecKit inside a larger loop.
- Not a replica of
Claude_Commandz. That repo is TurtleWolfe's full 65-command disaster-recovery backup. The Chapter 03 starter kit here is the minimal 10 commands an intern actually uses in week one. - Not a code library. No generators, no scaffolds. This is documentation plus exercises.
- Claude Code installed and working (
claude --versionreturns something) - Docker Desktop installed (required — Chapter 01 fails without it)
- Git installed
- A terminal you're comfortable in
- Optional but helpful: a GitHub account
If you hit a question the repo didn't answer, or an exercise that didn't work, open an issue. The /principles directory exists precisely because every rule in here started as a war story. Your question is the next war story.
Ready? Start with Chapter 00.