Claude 101 · lesson 3 of 6
claude.ai Features
The consumer/team surface. The "Claude 101" course on Skilljar focuses heavily on this.
Core building blocks
- Conversations — multi-turn chat with memory inside the conversation.
- Projects — a workspace with a persistent system prompt + uploaded knowledge files. Use when you have a recurring task that needs the same reference material.
- File uploads — PDFs, code, CSVs, images. Files become part of the context for the conversation.
- Artifacts — separate panel for code, documents, diagrams Claude generates. Editable, versioned.
- Computer use / browser — Claude can drive a browser session in supported tiers.
- MCP connectors — claude.ai can attach MCP servers (Gmail, Calendar, Slack, etc.) to extend Claude with real-world actions.
Projects deep dive
A Project = system prompt + reference docs + (optional) custom instructions.
Use cases:
- "Marketing voice" Project with brand guide, recent posts, target audience.
- "Engineering" Project with architecture diagrams and coding standards.
- "Sales" Project with battle cards and ICP definitions.
Tradeoff: Project knowledge counts against context, so don't dump entire repos. Curate.
What this maps to in cert prep
The CCA-F exam is not about claude.ai UI usage, but understanding Projects is helpful background for the System Prompt Engineering domain — Projects are essentially packaged system prompts + retrieval.