Setting up your AI environment: accounts, browser and five terminal commands

Why you should care: you don’t need to “install AI”. You need a browser, two accounts and fifteen minutes. That covers every everyday task in this course. The second half of this lesson adds a black window with five commands — you only need it for the coding-agent lesson later in the track, and even then there are ways around it, as you’ll read below.

Five words before we start

• Browser — the program you use to open websites: Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge. If you are reading this page, you are using one right now.
• Account — your personal login for a website, usually an email address and a password. It is what keeps your chats available on any device.
• App / app store — an app is a program you install on your phone or laptop. Install only from the official store: App Store on iPhone, Google Play on Android, Microsoft Store on Windows. That one rule blocks most of the junk.
• Bookmark (and pinned tab) — a saved address in your browser, usually in the row under the address bar. A pinned tab stays open and jumps to the front. Both exist so you stop retyping addresses.
• 2FA (two-factor authentication) — a second step when logging in, usually a code on your phone. Even if somebody steals your password, they still can’t get in.

The 80/20: two accounts today, a third this week

* As of this writing, all three have a free plan, but plans and limits change every few months. Check the current offer on the official pricing page before you pay for anything — and don’t pay at all while you’re just learning.

Sign up with your existing Google account or email. Nothing else is needed today.

The setup, on any device

Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone, Android — the steps are the same everywhere:

Skip, for now: WSL (running Linux inside Windows — for developers), Python (a programming language), local models (AI running on your own machine, which crawls on a weak laptop), any “AI optimizer” utility, third-party “AI assistant” apps with big ads and subscriptions — and above all, any script a site asks you to run in PowerShell or Terminal that you don’t understand. A script is just a list of commands your computer obeys blindly. None of this helps a beginner; some of it is a great way to break your laptop.

What actually happens when you press Enter

Click through all five and watch the green out› line under each one. Step 2 is the one to notice: what leaves your device is never your sentence alone — it travels with the company’s instructions and the whole chat so far, which is why the same question can get a different answer in a different chat.

Two practical consequences: your words are stored on someone else’s computer (so don’t paste secrets), and you need an internet connection (so offline plane mode won’t work).

One security step worth two minutes

And one habit: never paste passwords, card numbers or passport data into a chat. No real task needs it.

That’s the whole everyday setup. Everything from here to the end of the lesson is about one optional thing: the terminal.

The terminal, in five minutes

One black window stands between you and the coding agent later in this track. It’s called the terminal, and it has a reputation for being scary. It isn’t.

Three more words, so nothing below is mysterious:

• Terminal — the window. Also called console, shell or command line.
• Directory — just the old word for folder.
• Command — one line of text you type and send with Enter.

Opening it — pick your system:

• Windows: press Start, type “Terminal” or “PowerShell”, press Enter. (On older Windows: “cmd”.)
• macOS: press Cmd+Space, type “Terminal”, press Enter.
• Linux: Ctrl+Alt+T, or find “Terminal” in the menu.

A window opens — black or white — with a line at the bottom ending in a blinking cursor. That line is the terminal asking “what next?”. Often it also shows where you currently are; that location is the thing to watch, because everything you type happens there.

The commands are identical on every system. Only the look of a location changes: /Users/dana on a Mac, /home/dana on Linux, C:\Users\dana on Windows. Read a path as an address, most specific part last.

1$ pwd
2/home/dana
3 
4$ ls
5Documents  Downloads  Music  Photos  recipes.txt
6 
7$ cd Documents
8$ pwd
9/home/dana/Documents
10 
11$ cd ..
12$ mkdir my-first-page
13$ cd my-first-page
14$ pwd
15/home/dana/my-first-page

Five commands, and that’s almost everything this track asks of you:

1. pwd — where am I?
2. ls — what’s here? On Windows the word is dir (in PowerShell both work).
3. cd Documents — walk into that folder.
4. cd .. — walk one step back up. Two dots always mean “the folder above”.
5. mkdir my-first-page — create a new folder. This is the one you’ll use to build a safe playground for your first agent.

Look at the second tab: ls is not a fixed answer, it’s a question about where you are standing. Same command, two folders, two different answers. That’s the one idea that makes the terminal click.

Three rules people trip over:

• Enter runs the command. Pasting just puts text on the line. Paste with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+V on most Linux terminals) or right-click.
• Ctrl+C is the way out if the terminal seems stuck — it cancels the current line or stops a running program. It deletes nothing.
• Spaces and case matter. cd My Project fails; cd "My Project" works. Easiest fix — no spaces in folder names.

Now try it yourself. Nothing here changes anything — it only looks around and makes one empty folder:

pwd
ls
mkdir terminal-practice
ls
cd terminal-practice
pwd
cd ..
pwd

If the second ls shows terminal-practice, you officially use a terminal.

When something doesn’t work

An install page confused you, or a command printed an error you don’t understand. Two habits cover both cases:

• For a command: read the last line of the error — that’s the actual complaint. Then run pwd and ls: most errors turn out to be “you’re not where you thought”. If the terminal seems stuck, Ctrl+C gets you out.
• For anything else: don’t guess. Describe what you see and let the assistant walk you through it, one sentence per message:

I'm setting up [which assistant / which command] on [Windows / macOS / Linux / iPhone / Android], and I'm stuck.

What I did: [the steps you took]
What I see now: [paste the exact wording of any message, or describe the screen]
I am not technical, so explain it in plain language.

Give me the next action as ONE sentence. After I do it, I'll tell you what happened, and you give me the next one.

Step by step, one sentence per message. It works surprisingly well, and it beats closing the tab in frustration.

Do this today

• Create one account in your browser and bookmark the site.
• Turn on 2FA for the Google account you signed up with.
• Install one official app on your phone and ask it something out loud.
• Run the terminal practice sheet above — four minutes, nothing to break.

Then put the setup away and use it: pick one task from the everyday scenarios. And when you hit a limit and wonder what is actually free right now, Free AI tools has the honest answer.

The takeaway

• Two free accounts and a browser tab — that’s the whole everyday setup.
• pwd, ls (or dir), cd, cd .., mkdir — that’s the whole terminal.
• Enter runs, Ctrl+C cancels, errors are text you can paste to an assistant.
• The terminal is the most capable path, not the only one — VS Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and Copilot do the same work through a normal interface.