Part 1 — Setup

Nothing in this part does any research. It gets you a machine you can reach, an identity it recognizes, a way to move data to it, and an assistant that can drive all three.

9:00 to 10:30. A short lecture on the two-day map and where your work will live, then a long work block to get yourself through the checkpoint at the end.

Take this lab content at your own pace, but try to finish the Checkpoint by 10:30 to be ready for the next lecture. Put up a red sticky if you run into trouble. If you’re moving fast, do the bonus exercises to level up (rather than moving ahead to future sections).

Part 1 assumes only two accounts: a GitHub account and Claude through Stanford. Everything else — the terminal, the Yens login, the access token — you set up here, starting from nothing. If either account is missing, flag it early rather than falling behind.

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Hands-On Lab

There’s lots of prose on these pages! If you’re running low on time, feel free to skim it. Make sure you finish the checkpoint by 10:30.

Section	Format	What you’ll learn
Connecting to the Yens	💻 Hands-on	Log in over SSH, and understand what a remote server is and why research uses one
Your Data on the Yens	💻 Hands-on	Home, projects and scratch — which are backed up, how to check your quota, and what’s eating it
Git & GitHub for Research	💻 Hands-on	Fork, clone, branch, commit, push — and why a research project wants version control
Working with Claude Code	📖 Read + 💻 hands-on	Concepts first, then you set it up, learn the controls, and give it a real task
Part 1 Checkpoint	✅ Checkpoint	Ten minutes proving the four things the rest of the course depends on actually work