Rung 3 — Give It Superpowers

The win: output a chatbox literally cannot produce — and the terminal stops being scary and starts being yours.

The two-minute setup gate

This is the one install in the whole hour. Do it once and Rungs 3–5 unlock — and it all happens inside the terminal, not in some app you download.

Step 1 — open your Terminal. On a Mac: press Cmd+Space, type "Terminal," and hit enter. It's just a box where you type commands; the agent does the rest.

Step 2 — install Claude Code. Paste this one line, press enter, and let it run:

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

On Windows, do these two prep steps before the install — they're the two things nearly every Windows user hits:

1. Set your PATH first. Add %USERPROFILE%\.local\bin to your User Path (Settings → search "environment variables" → Edit for your account → the top box, not System), then reopen PowerShell. Run the install before this and you get an error you can't continue past.
2. Enable copy/paste in PowerShell. Right-click the top bar of the PowerShell window → Properties → tick the copy-and-paste checkbox → restart PowerShell. Now the paste-this-line steps actually paste.

Then run the install in PowerShell:

irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

No Homebrew, no Node, no Xcode, no "developer setup" — it's one self-contained download that runs on a stock Mac. If you've heard you need all that dev stuff, that was the old way. Not anymore — we tested it from scratch.

The one Mac gotcha — PATH. If you type claude next and the terminal says "command not found," your terminal just doesn't know where it landed yet. Paste this once and reopen Terminal:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

Copy

That's the whole fix. (Windows users: you already handled this in prep step 1.)

Step 3 — start it. Type claude, press enter, and sign in when it opens your browser. You're in.

Step 4 — grab your access token. Back in the terminal, run:

claude setup-token

Sign in once more and it prints a token starting with sk-ant-oat…. Copy it — that single token is what plugs your Claude subscription into Optimus: your skills, your files, and the same agent across all three surfaces (desktop, web, and your pocket). You paste it once, and everything lights up.

The agent runs on Claude Pro or Max (~$20/mo). The free chat plan doesn't include it — and honestly, that's the point: twenty bucks a month for the most powerful AI on earth is the cheapest superpower you'll ever buy. If you're serious about this, you want it anyway.

Stuck on the install? Normal the first time — paste the error into the chatbot from Rung 1, ask "what do I do?", and do exactly what it says.

Not ready for the terminal? Claude Cowork — Claude's agent right inside the desktop app — does the same thing with a click, no terminal at all. But the terminal is where the real power lives, and it's easier than you think.

Now run a Skill

A Skill is a packaged expert your agent loads on command. Try one:

• Type: "Find me three available domain names for a newsletter about AI agents" and watch it actually check availability — that's a skill + a tool working together.
• Or run a built-in slash command and let it drive.

The leap you just made

A chatbot answers from memory. A terminal agent acts on your machine — it can run skills, use tools, read and write real files. That's the difference between advice and work getting done. You're past the hard part now.

Next: Rung 4 — Command the Team → — one instruction, a whole crew of agents, a real web package.