The frame
Free is not the hard part. Choosing is.
The catalog is 22 courses. If you added all of them up you would be looking at something like 70 hours of material, and a big chunk of it is written for people who are not you.
Two things nobody tells you before you start clicking:
Nine of the 22 are the same course. AI Fluency is one framework, re-cut for builders, educators, nonprofits, students, small businesses, pK-12 teachers, and the people who train those teachers. You need exactly one of them. Taking a second is rereading the same book with different examples.
Three courses are 25 hours by themselves. Building with the Claude API, Claude with Amazon Bedrock, and Claude with Google Cloud's Vertex AI run 65 to 67 lessons each. They are excellent and they are for engineers shipping production software. If that is not you today, skipping them is not falling behind.
Cut those, and the thing gets very manageable. Here is what is left.
The path
Take these four, in this order
Each one assumes the one before it. Roughly 7 hours total, and you can do it across a week of lunch breaks.
The foundation. First conversation through projects, artifacts, skills, and connected tools. Even if you use Claude every day, the projects and connected-tools lessons are where most people find the thing they did not know existed.
The jump from asking to delegating. Set up a workspace, give it context, hand over a multi-step task, get a finished deliverable back. This is the one that changes how much you actually get done.
Claude Code is the most powerful thing Anthropic makes and it is not just for developers. One hour. Take it even if you have never written a line of code, because this is the tool that builds the rest of your systems.
The compounding one. A skill is a reusable instruction set Claude applies automatically to matching work. Anything you do twice should become one. This is the course that turns your AI use into a system instead of a habit.
The fifth one
Pick one AI Fluency track. Only one.
AI Fluency is the odd one out in the catalog because it has nothing to do with Claude. It is a framework for working with any AI without getting garbage back, built on four things: delegation, description, discernment, and diligence. Deciding what to hand over, saying it clearly, judging what comes back, and checking it.
That skill outlives every tool in the catalog. Models change every few weeks. Knowing what to delegate and how to tell when the output is wrong does not.
Default to AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations (14 lessons, 4 hr). It is the original. Only swap it for one of the audience-specific versions if you are literally that audience and you want the examples to match your job. And if you do, take that one instead, not in addition.
Later
Where to go after the four
Do not open these on day one. Come back when you have hit the wall the course is named after.
Claude Code in Action 9 lessons · 1 hr
When your Claude Code sessions keep going off the rails and you want long hands-off runs you can actually trust.
Introduction to Model Context Protocol 10 lessons · 1 hr
When you want Claude connected to a tool nobody has built a connector for yet, and you are ready to build it.
Introduction to subagents 4 lessons · 45 min
When one task is too big for one Claude and you want several working the problem in parallel.
Claude Platform 101 13 lessons · 1.5 hr
The gentle on-ramp to the API if you are curious but not ready for the 67-lesson version. Start here, not there.
How to actually keep it
Do not watch this like Netflix
Free courses have a brutal completion rate, and the ones people do finish, they mostly forget. Not because the material is bad. Because watching someone else do a thing feels like learning and is not.
Three rules that fix it:
Have Claude open in the other tab. Every lesson, do the thing on your own real work before clicking next. Not the course's example. Your actual project, your actual client, your actual inbox.
Bring one specific problem with you. Pick something that eats an hour of your week right now and try to kill it as you go. The course stops being abstract the second it has a job.
Turn anything you repeat into a skill. This is why agent skills is in the four. The moment you notice you have asked Claude for the same kind of thing twice, stop and make it permanent. That is the difference between using AI and building a system that keeps paying you.
Four courses. Seven hours. Then a certificate from Anthropic, which is a nice thing to have on a profile right now, and a much nicer thing to have actually earned.