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Claude API · hands-on

Learn the Claude API by fixing a support queue that is drowning.

Northwind Outfitters takes 4,100 support tickets a week and sorts them by hand. Two attempts at automating it failed. A child’s injury report sat unrouted for three days because it opened with “probably nothing.” You build the service that fixes that — and every capability you learn is one the fix actually needs.

Or watch the two-minute intro, or read the scenario — every design decision in the labs traces back to it.

Building something with it? Ask a question or share your build on GitHub Discussions.

Personal educational project. Views are my own and are not affiliated with or endorsed by Cursor.

Start with however long you have

Two of these three need nothing but a browser.

60 seconds

Watch it work on your own words

Walk into the fictional shop, tell its support desk something went wrong, and watch a live model categorise it, rank its urgency, and decide whether a person needs to see it.

Open the storefrontNothing to install. No key.
20 minutes

Start from zero

Make one small Claude API request, change it, and learn what a model, message, response, and token actually are before building anything bigger.

Make your first requestNothing to install. No key.
An afternoon

Build the whole service

From your first API call to an eval harness with an LLM judge, against one coherent codebase you can read end to end. Solutions included for every lab.

Start Lab 1Node 20+, an API key, $2–4 of tokens.

Or let me walk you through it

Two minutes: the queue, the ticket that sat for three days, and what you build to catch it.

Watch on YouTube

Four routes, four capabilities

One domain. Each route introduces exactly one new idea and builds on the one before it.

POST /v1/triage
Structured outputs

The model's output contract is your type system

POST /v1/resolve
Tool use

Claude queries your systems and shows its work

POST /v1/draft
Streaming

Token-by-token delivery over SSE, with real cost accounting

POST /v1/estimate
Token counting

Know the bill before you pay it