Her first evening in a terminal, and something went red. I knew what the error was. I didn’t tell her. She pasted it into the AI instead, and it fixed it: a tool the command needed was not installed on her Mac yet, so it installed it.
The prompt
There barely is one. You paste the error and press Enter. If you want words with it:
What to paste
- The command you ran. Not just the error. The AI needs to know what you were trying to do.
- Everything it printed, from the start. The last red line is usually the least useful one. The cause is often a few lines above it.
- Or a screenshot of the whole terminal window. Every chat app takes one.
The more it sees, the better it guesses. On the show, the first try was copying the wrong part. Copy from the command down.
How to copy out of a terminal
- Mac (Terminal): select the text with the mouse, then Command + C. Screenshot: Command + Shift + 4, then drag.
- Windows (Terminal): select the text, then Ctrl + C. In a terminal, Ctrl + C with nothing selected stops the running command instead, so select first. Screenshot: Windows + Shift + S.
Read what it says back
It will usually tell you what broke and hand you a command to fix it. Don’t just run it. Ask first:
An error is the best lesson a terminal gives you. “Command not found” means something isn’t installed yet. “Permission denied” means you are not allowed to touch that file or folder. Once you’ve had each explained once, you start reading them yourself.
And if its fix fails, paste the new error back. Same move, one more round.
Before you paste
Terminal output can carry things you should not share: API keys, tokens, passwords, sometimes your full name in a folder path. Look before you paste. If a key did slip into a chat, replace the key. Deleting the chat is not enough.
This works in any AI chat app. With Claude Code on your own computer, the agent sees the error itself, so there is nothing to copy. That is what Course 01 sets up.
