(2025-10-29) Torres Claude Code What It Is How Its Different And Why Nontechnical People Should Use It

Teresa Torres: Claude Code: What It Is, How It's Different, and Why Non-Technical People Should Use It. I love Claude Code. I started using it back in June to help me with some coding projects and it has since crept into everything that I do. I use it to manage tasks, to do research, to be my writing buddy, and so much more.

But I've noticed that if you don't use Claude Code, it's hard to understand exactly what it is and why it's different from what you see in the browser.

Claude Code is a version of Claude that you run from within the terminal

When you run Claude inside a command-line app (via Claude Code), Claude can also browse and act on your files the same way you can.

How is Claude Code Different?

Suppose you need to research five competitors and create a competitive landscape analysis. You have a list of competitor names, but otherwise you're starting from scratch.

*You could start at Claude.ai and type in your request into a new chat. Or you might choose to set up a new Project at Claude.ai. You could use the Claude desktop app or you could use Claude Code.

Each of these access points has distinct features and functionality. They differ in how they let you create memory or context for Claude, in how you access your own files, in how you can create personalized shortcuts, and most importantly, in how portable your data is.*

Let's explore how we might conduct competitive research using each of these access points.

Conducting a Competitive Landscape with Claude in the Browser

Conducting a Competitive Analysis in a Claude Project

A month later, when a new competitor enters the market, you simply return to your Project and start a new chat for the competitor.

A Project allows you to share instructions and files across chats.

Conducting a Competitive Analysis in Claude Desktop with MCP

Now imagine you decided to use Claude Desktop.

However, there is one key difference: Claude Desktop is also an MCP client. If you aren't familiar with MCP, that means you can configure Claude Code to read and write to your Google Docs directly. No more copying and pasting. But understanding how MCP works, finding the right servers, and getting them to work correctly isn't the easiest task.

Conducting a Competitive Analysis with Claude Code

You ask Claude Code to browse your pricing page and marketing website and summarize what it learns in a product-info.md file, a markdown file.

Next, you tell Claude what you'd like to include in a competitor analysis and you ask it to add those instructions to competitive-analysis.md.

You realize you need to do this four more times, so you ask Claude to make an agent using the instructions in the competitive-analysis.md file.

A special attribute of agents is that you can ask Claude to do several tasks at the same time by using multiple instances of your agent

*You start to wonder who else might be a competitor and you realize you'll need to repeat this task again in the future. So you start to consider how to make it more extensible.

You have a few problems to consider:
how to keep your competitor list current
how to keep your own product's pricing and feature list current
how to regenerate the price comparison and feature comparison tables whenever something changes*

A month later, when a new competitor enters the market, you add the company name to your competitor list and you run /update-competitors. A few minutes later Claude is done and you have updated price comparison and feature comparison tables.

This is today's reality

And That's Not All: You Own Your Data

Now imagine ChatGPT-6 comes out and it outperforms Claude. You want to switch.

If you use Claude Code, you simply download Codex (ChatGPT's equivalent to Claude Code) and point it at the same markdown files Claude Code was using. There's nothing to port. Everything is markdown (which is just text). Codex can read it. There's no vendor lock in. You own your data. You get to decide how, when, and where to use it.

A Quick Note on Agent Skills

While I was writing this article, Anthropic launched Agent Claude Skills and announced they would be available across all platforms (e.g. in the browser, Projects, Desktop, and Claude Code).

So what's a Skill? It's stored instructions, context files, and scripts (meaning deterministic code). You can think about it like a more powerful Project, because in addition to shared instructions and files, you can also define some code-based actions.

Why These Differences Matter

Here's what changes when you shift from browser Claude to Claude Code:

You Stop Repeating Yourself

In the browser, every chat starts from scratch. Even with Projects, you're managing context within that Project only.

But with Claude Code, your files are your context.

competitors.md lives in your Competitive Analysis folder. Claude reads it automatically. When you add a new feature to product-info.md, Claude sees it immediately. No re-uploading. No pasting into chats.

This sounds like a small thing until you're maintaining multiple Projects, working across different initiatives, or updating information regularly

You Build Systems That Compound

You're not just saving time on one task. You're building reusable systems.

Every future analysis benefits automatically.

You Work in Parallel Instead of Sequentially

With Claude Code's parallel agents, each competitor gets:

• Its own context window (no degradation)
• The same framework (no drift from fatigue—you get the same thorough analysis no matter how many competitor analyses you run)
• Simultaneous processing (5x faster than sequential)

"But I'm Not Technical..."

Using Claude Code isn't about being technical. It's about being willing to try three to four simple commands.

Getting Started with Claude Code

1. What's the Terminal?

2. Install Node.js

3. Install Claude Code

4. Start Claude Code

When you launch Claude Code, you'll launch it in the context of a folder (also called a directory) on your computer.

For example, if you have a folder called Competitive Analysis and you launch Claude Code within that folder, then Claude will be able to read all of the files in that folder.

So you'll want to launch Claude Code from within the folder where you want it to work.

5. Complete the Initial Claude Code Setup

Once the setup is done, you can type whatever you want into the window and Claude will respond. It works just like using Claude in the browser. The difference is Claude Code has some superpowers that the browser doesn't have.