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Mastering Claude

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Getting good work out of Claude8 lessons54 min
Three stacked blocks, role, context and task, snapping into an alignment frameGetting good work out of Claude
Path 2, module 4 of 5

Techniques that change the result

  1. 01Chaining prompts7 min

    Chaining means breaking a complex task into several short messages, where the answer to one serves as raw material for the next. Each link becomes a point where you can read, correct, or stop the chain before continuing. The simplest pattern runs draft, review, correction.

  2. 02Giving Claude hands7 min

    Claude acts beyond text by going through a tool, a function described by a name, an explanation and the shape of its arguments. It chooses to call it and proposes arguments, but execution always falls to something other than Claude, your application or certain Anthropic servers. The more precise the description, the closer the arguments come to what was intended.

  3. 03Composing a system prompt from several sources8 min

    Take a rule from elsewhere and rewrite it in your own words for your own situation, rather than copying it as is. When an imported rule contradicts one already in place, the rule of the system prompt's owner has priority. Then check that the rephrased rule still triggers the expected behaviour.

  4. 04Citing sources and not beating about the bush6 min

    A useful citation fits in an inline bracket right after the sentence it proves, one source per bracket, with no separate section at the end of the message, and a direct answer states the fact instead of announcing it and then closing with a polite question.

  5. 05Structured outputs and guardrails6 min

    Forcing an exact schema on an output and checking that output before using it are two halves of the same reflex, one forces the form upstream, the other controls it downstream, and both matter more when the action that follows cannot be undone.

  6. 06Checking a prompt the way you check a result6 min

    You check a prompt with an eval, a fixed set of test cases written in advance that scores it automatically, not on a few examples tried by chance. A prompt improved by asking Claude (meta-prompting) stays a draft and goes through the same set of cases. Retest on exactly the same set, before and after.

  7. 07Asking several times, and contradicting yourself6 min

    Asking for several independent answers and keeping the majority filters out the noise of a single answer, and asking Claude to play devil's advocate against its own answer finds errors a single pass misses, provided you always run a final synthesis to sort the valid objections from the noise.

  8. 08The premortem: assume the plan has already failed8 min

    The premortem reverses the question. Instead of asking whether the plan is good, which invites looking for reasons to say yes, you state that it has already failed and ask for the autopsy. It brings out the causes of failure, which remain hypotheses to check.