Part 1 Checkpoint

Nobody learns the terminal, cluster storage, git and Claude Code in an hour, and Part 1 did not try to. What it did was get each of them working once, in your hands, on a real repo.

Before moving on, here is a sanity check to make sure you’re ready for Part 2. If you had to skip over some material in Part 1, that’s OK! You can always come back and review it later.

If one of these fails, put up a 🔴 red sticky right away. Part 2 will build on this, so let’s get it straightened out as soon as possible.

What You Should Be Able to Do

# Skill Where you learned it
1 Reach the Yens over SSH Connecting to the Yens
2 Have git and Claude configured and authenticated Git & GitHub · Working with Claude Code
3 Fork, branch, commit and push — on this course’s own repo Git & GitHub
4 Get Claude Code to drive git for you Working with Claude Code

The Run

1 — SSH to the Yens

From your laptop, in a terminal — Terminal on macOS, Git Bash or PowerShell on Windows:

ssh SUNetID@yen.stanford.edu

Password, then Duo. You should land on a banner and a prompt on one of yen1–yen5.

hostname            # which Yen did the load balancer give me?
whoami              # am I logged in as myself?

2 — git and Claude are configured

Still on the Yens:

ml gh-cli claude-code       # both are modules — load them first
gh auth status              # should say: Logged in to github.com account YOUR_USERNAME
claude                      # should open, signed in, not asking you to log in

Inside Claude, confirm the skill took:

> do you have the github-for-research skill?

If gh auth status reports you are not logged in, your token never landed — go back to Step 3 of the Git exercise. The push in check 3 proves the other half: if it asks you for a password, you ran gh auth login but not gh auth setup-git.

3 — git and GitHub, on this very site

You already forked and cloned this course’s repo. Worth noticing what that means: the page you are reading is a file in it. docs/day1/part1-checkpoint.md is this checkpoint.

To make sure you can manipulate a repo, let’s alter this one:

cd ~/yens-onboarding-2026
git checkout -b checkpoint
echo "- Updated notes.md by hand for the Part 1 checkpoint" >> notes.md
git add notes.md
git commit -m "Using git manually to update notes.md for Part 1 checkpoint"
git push -u origin checkpoint

Then open the checkpoint branch on your fork and confirm your commit is on it. If the push succeeded without asking for a password, check 2 is genuinely working.

Committing to a branch, not main. That is the habit the whole course runs on, and the reason your main still matches the class repo.

4 — Let Claude drive

The same operation, asked for rather than typed. From ~/yens-onboarding-2026 on the Yens — the same directory you were just in, so Claude is working in the repo and on the checkpoint branch — launch claude and press Shift+Tab until the mode line reads plan mode, so you get to read what it intends before anything happens:

> Use the github-for-research skill. Add a line to notes.md saying I used Claude Code to
> update the notes to complete the Part 1 checkpoint, commit it on the current branch
> with a message explaining why, and push.

Watch what it does before you approve it. You are checking three things: that it picks up the skill, that it shows you the commit message before making it, and that the push goes through on your credentials. Read the message it wrote — if it says what changed but not why, tell it so and have it try again.

This is the loop for the rest of the two days: you know what the git command is, so you can tell when Claude gets it wrong. That is the whole reason step 3 comes before step 4 and not the other way round.

Before You Move On

🟢 Green sticky = all four checks ran

Put one on your laptop lid so we can see you are through the checkpoint.

Be back and ready at 10:30 for the next lecture. If you have time before then, have a go at the bonus exercises rather than starting Part 2:

Page last modified: Sep 16, 2026.

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