This guide covers the full setup from zero: installing VS Code, setting up Claude Code, connecting to the API, and the exact instructions I give Claude Code to scrape competitors and generate the report. No coding experience needed. If you can copy-paste, you can do this. What you'll build: - A system that scrapes every video from your competitors (titles, views, thumbnails, dates) - Automatic outlier detection that finds videos that got way more views than usual for that channel - Full transcript analysis of the top-performing videos - A beautiful HTML report with actionable insights, sorted by priority What you'll need: - A laptop (Mac or Windows) - ~$5/month for Apify (the scraping tool) - ~$20/month for Claude API credits (the AI that does the analysis) - 30-60 minutes of your time Let's go. STEP 1: Install VS Code VS Code is a free code editor. You won't be writing code, it's just where Claude Code lives. 1. Go to code.visualstudio.com 2. Download for your operating system (Mac / Windows / Linux) 3. Install it and open it 4. Open a terminal inside VS Code: press Ctrl+` (backtick) on Windows or Cmd+` on Mac. A terminal panel will appear at the bottom. That's it. You don't need to know how VS Code works beyond this. STEP 2: Install Claude Code Claude Code is Anthropic's CLI tool. It lets you have a conversation with Claude directly in your terminal, and Claude can read/write files, run scripts, and access APIs. On Mac: 1. Make sure you have Node.js installed. Open Terminal and run: node --version If you see a version number (like v20.x.x), you're good. If not, go to nodejs.org and install the LTS version. 2. Install Claude Code: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code 3. Verify it works: claude --version On Windows: 1. Install Node.js from nodejs.org (LTS version) 2. Open VS Code terminal and run: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code 3. Verify: claude --version STEP 3: Connect to the Anthropic API Claude Code needs an API key to talk to Claude.