beginner10 min read· Module 1, Lesson 5
🧠Meet Claude — Your AI Assistant
What makes Claude different and why developers love it
Meet Claude
Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic, a company focused on making AI that is safe, helpful, and honest. Think of Claude as a super-knowledgeable colleague who can help you with almost anything.
What Can Claude Do?
Claude excels at tasks involving language, reasoning, analysis, and coding:
| What Claude Does | Example |
|---|---|
| Answer questions | "Explain quantum physics like I'm 10" |
| Write code | "Write a Python function that sorts a list" |
| Analyze documents | "Summarize this 50-page report" |
| Generate content | "Write a blog post about healthy eating" |
| Translate text | "Translate this to Spanish" |
| Debug code | "Why is my code throwing this error?" |
| Reason through problems | "What's the best database for my use case?" |
| Read images | "What's in this screenshot?" |
Claude Model Family
Claude comes in different "sizes" — like having different employees for different jobs:
| Model | Best For | Speed | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.7 | Complex reasoning, coding, long tasks | Moderate | $5 input / $25 output per million tokens |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Best balance of speed + intelligence | Fast | $3 input / $15 output per million tokens |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Quick tasks, high volume | Fastest | $1 input / $5 output per million tokens |
Which one should you use?
- Learning & experimenting? → Start with Sonnet (good balance)
- Need the smartest responses? → Use Opus (most capable)
- Building a chatbot with many users? → Use Haiku (cheapest & fastest)
Two Ways to Use Claude
| Method | What It Is | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| claude.ai | Website where you chat with Claude | Quick questions, personal use |
| API (Application Programming Interface) | Code-level access to Claude | Building apps, automation |
In this course, we'll teach you both — but the focus is on building things with the API and Claude Code CLI.
What Makes Claude Special?
- Massive Context Window — Claude can read up to 1 million tokens at once (that's ~750,000 words, or about 10 novels!)
- Vision — Claude can see and understand images
- Tool Use — Claude can use tools like web search, code execution, and more
- Extended Thinking — Claude can "think step by step" for complex problems
- Safety — Claude is designed to be helpful but refuse harmful requests
Key Context Window Sizes
| Model | Context Window | That's About... |
|---|---|---|
| Opus 4.7 | 1M tokens | ~555,000 words |
| Sonnet 4.6 | 1M tokens | ~750,000 words |
| Haiku 4.5 | 200K tokens | ~150,000 words |
Next up: We'll understand what an API is and how developers talk to Claude through code.