How a small team shipped Alpha with Claude Code

Alpha Education Abroad is a counseling team, not a software company with a floor of engineers. We build Alpha with Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, and keep the loop short: design, build, test, ship.

What we built this way

• The website and its drawing-sheet design system.
• The student portal: accounts, the 8-stage tracker, the document vault and staff review.
• AI Match’s rule engine and result pages.
• SOP Coach’s instant checks.
• The LLM layer: prompts, structured output schemas, guardrails and the counselor fallback.

Testing is part of the loop

Every flow is run end to end before it ships, including the unhappy paths: spam submissions, wrong passwords, oversized or disguised files, and one student trying to reach another student’s data. Test accounts and files are removed afterwards.

Why it matters for students

A small team can ship features in days instead of months, and spend the time it saves where it counts: with students, checking their plans.