Setting Up Your Workstation
From zero to a fully equipped development machine
Overview
Before you can contribute to a project, fix a bug, or even read source code properly, you need a working environment. This chapter gets your machine ready — from scratch, on whatever OS you're running.
By the end of this exercise, you'll have a terminal, a package manager, Git, the GitHub CLI, Node.js, and optionally an AI coding agent — Claude Code or Antigravity CLI — all ready to go.
AI coding agents live in the terminal. You can't pair-program with an agent if you don't have a place for it to work. Think of this as setting up your workshop before you start building.
— from the exercise
By the end of this exercise.
- ✓A terminal ready to use (PowerShell, zsh, or bash)
- ✓A package manager installed (WinGet, Homebrew, or apt)
- ✓Git installed and configured with your identity, with new repositories starting on main
- ✓GitHub CLI authenticated with your account
- ✓Node.js LTS and npm, ready for the later exercises
- ✓Optional: Claude Code (official installer; needs a paid Claude plan or Console API credit) or Antigravity CLI (agy, free weekly quota)
- ✓An agent started in manual permission mode, so you approve every command it runs
Terms you'll learn.
- Terminal
- The command-line interface where you'll run everything in this book
- Package manager
- Install software by typing one command instead of downloading installers
- Git
- Version control — tracks every change you make to a project
- GitHub CLI
- Talk to GitHub from your terminal — no browser needed
- sudo
- Run a command as administrator (Linux/macOS)
- Manual mode
- A permission mode where the agent asks before it runs anything that changes your machine
Sections in this exercise.
- 01Open Your Terminal
- 02Install a Package Manager
- 03Install Git
- 04See Git in Action
- 05Install the GitHub CLI
- 06Create a GitHub Account
- 07Authenticate
- 08Install Node.js
- 09(Optional) Install an AI Coding Agent
- 10Verify Everything
- 11The Prompt-First Way
You now have a complete development environment — installed from official sources, configured, and verified. Your agent asks before it acts, and you read each command before you approve it. This is your workshop, and it's ready for the first real project.