Anthropic courses and how to stay up to date with AI tooling

TL;DR

These are essential even if you use OpenAI or another LLM provider instead of Claude — they’re general foundations for working with any generative AI, not Claude-specific:

If you’re more technical and want to build: Building with the Claude API.

Below — my take on the other courses. Pick what’s relevant to you, skip the rest.

  1. Claude 101 — short, good starting point if you’re new to Claude products. (certificate)
  2. Claude Code 101 — short, but too surface-level to use Claude Code effectively. (certificate)
  3. Introduction to Claude Cowork — good, quick intro to Cowork. Recommended for everyone. (certificate)
  4. Claude Code in Action — pretty outdated, avoid it. (certificate)
  5. AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations — great general course, a framework for how and when to work with AI. Recommended for everyone. (certificate)
  6. Building with the Claude API — detailed course covering MCP, agents and workflows, basic RAG, evals, and prompt engineering. Recommended for any builder or engineer. (certificate)
  7. Introduction to Model Context Protocol — covered inside Building with the Claude API. Skip if you took that one. (certificate)
  8. AI Fluency for educators — watched because I work in EdTech. Practical application of AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations for course and lesson design. (certificate)
  9. AI Fluency for students — AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations in practice for learners. Core idea: use AI as a learning partner, not a substitute for actually learning. (certificate)
  10. Model Context Protocol: Advanced Topics — detailed, focuses on the HTTP approach for MCP. Worth a look if you want to build your own MCP server. (certificate)
  11. Claude with Amazon Bedrock — same content as Building with the Claude API but for Bedrock. Pick one based on your platform. (certificate)
  12. Claude with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI — same content as Building with the Claude API but for Vertex AI. Pick one based on your platform. (certificate)
  13. Teaching AI Fluency — good reference if you need to teach others about AI fluency. (certificate)
  14. AI Fluency for nonprofits — 4D framework applied in practice. Useful well beyond the nonprofit context. (certificate)
  15. Introduction to agent skills — short, good intro to skills. Key points: skills priority, and the idea that skills should ideally be invoked automatically — Claude uses semantic matching on the skill’s description to decide when to trigger it. Note: subagents only use skills that are explicitly listed for them. (certificate)
  16. Introduction to subagents — short, good intro to subagents. Covers when to use them and when not to. (certificate)
  17. AI Capabilities and Limitations — must-have. Sets the right mindset for what to keep in mind when working with AI. (certificate)

Not covered in the courses but worth learning:

Important: these courses are just a baseline — Claude and other AI tools evolve every few weeks. To stay current, I’d use Claude Cowork (or other tool) to pull and digest content from X.com. For whatever reason, X is where Anthropic and OpenAI engineers post their thoughts and practices, and where companies drop their release notes.

X accounts I follow for updates:

YouTube channels:

  • @claude — Anthropic’s official channel. Worth checking after conferences — they post talks and demos with practical content