Day-1 question: “How do I start a new project with Claude Code?”
Time budget: 15 minutes
You’ll finish with: A new repo cloned from hello-world-ai, renamed, booted under Docker, and a first commit shipped via /commit.
The fastest path to a working project is to clone hello-world-ai and rename it. It’s a minimal Next.js 15 + Docker Compose starter with the 10-command starter kit pre-installed at .claude/commands/. From clone to first commit: under 15 minutes.
Follow: clone-the-starter.md
Then do the exercise.
That’s Chapter 01. You’re done. Come back for the dig-deeper if you need to bootstrap a repo without the starter.
| Situation | Path |
|---|---|
| New side project, learning exercise, prototype | Clone the starter. clone-the-starter.md |
| Contributing to an existing repo | Clone the existing repo; this chapter doesn’t apply |
| Your stack is not Next.js + Docker (Python, Go, Rust, etc.) | from-scratch.md — the manual bootstrap recipe |
You want to understand what hello-world-ai is made of |
from-scratch.md — it documents each template file |
templates/ contains the raw building blocks of hello-world-ai:
CLAUDE.md.template — the skeleton every repo should have (explained in Chapter 02)gitignore.template — the minimum .gitignore for a Node + Docker projectdocker-compose.yml.template — Docker-first starter for any Node projectenv.example.template — the ${VAR:-placeholder} pattern for secretsUse these when cloning hello-world-ai doesn’t fit your stack.
exercise.md — Clone hello-world-ai, rename it to my-first-ai-project, boot it with docker compose up, and ship the first commit via /commit. 15 minutes.
Previous: Chapter 00 — Start Here · Next: Chapter 02 — Give It Context · All parts: the series in order