Claude, the AI assistant built by Anthropic, has quietly become one of the most capable tools available for writing, analysis, coding, and research. But most people use a fraction of what it can do. This guide cuts past the basics into the tips, lesser-known “secrets,” and ready-to-use prompts that separate casual users from people who get genuinely great results.
First, pick the right Claude for the job
Claude comes in a family of models, from fastest-and-cheapest to most-capable: Haiku (speed and volume), Sonnet (the everyday workhorse, strong at coding and writing), and Opus (deep reasoning and long, complex tasks), with newer top tiers above them. The trick most people miss: you don’t always want the biggest model. Use a faster model for quick drafting, classification, and back-and-forth, and switch to a heavier model only when a task needs real reasoning. You’ll get faster answers and, on the API, lower costs.
7 Claude tips and secrets
1. Give Claude a role and a format
The single highest-leverage habit: tell Claude who to be and exactly what shape the answer should take. “Act as a senior financial analyst. Return a 5-row table with columns: metric, value, trend, risk” beats “analyze this” every time.
2. Structure complex prompts with tags
For anything with multiple parts, wrap each part in simple labels like <context>, <task>, and <example>. Claude is specifically good at following this structure, and it keeps long instructions from blurring together.
3. Ask for the thinking, not just the answer
On hard problems, add “think step by step before answering.” For high-stakes work, ask Claude to lay out its reasoning, then give its conclusion. You’ll catch errors you’d otherwise miss.
4. Use Projects to stop repeating yourself
If you keep pasting the same background, put it in a Project with custom instructions and reference files. Every chat in that Project inherits the context, so you skip the setup each time.
5. Feed it files and images
Claude reads documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and images, and has a very large context window, so you can hand it long reports or whole codebases and ask questions across all of it. Stop summarizing for the AI; let the AI do the summarizing.
6. Show one good example
One example of the output you want is worth a paragraph of description. Paste a sample in the style, tone, or structure you’re after and say “match this.”
7. Extend Claude with Skills and Connectors
Beyond chat, Claude can be extended with Skills (reusable expertise) and Connectors that let it work with your tools and data. This is where Claude shifts from “answering questions” to “doing the work.”
5 copy-and-paste prompts to try today
Summarize anything, your way:
Summarize the text below for a busy executive. Give me: 3 bullet takeaways, 1 risk, and 1 recommended next step. Keep it under 120 words. [paste text]
Turn rough notes into a clean draft:
You are an editor. Turn these rough notes into a clear, professional email. Keep my meaning, fix the structure, and give me two subject-line options. Notes: [paste]
Extract structured data from messy text:
From the text below, extract every company name, the amount mentioned, and the date, as a markdown table. If a field is missing, write “N/A”. [paste]
Learn a topic fast:
Explain [topic] to me in three layers: a one-sentence version, a one-paragraph version, and a “what most people get wrong” version. Then quiz me with 3 questions.
Pressure-test a decision:
I’m deciding whether to [decision]. Argue the strongest case for it, then the strongest case against it, then tell me what additional information would change your answer.
Common mistakes to avoid
Vague one-line prompts; burying the actual request under paragraphs of preamble; expecting perfection on the first try instead of iterating; and using the heaviest, slowest model for trivial tasks. Treat Claude like a sharp new colleague: the clearer your brief, the better the work.
The bottom line
Claude rewards clarity. Tell it who to be, give it the context and a format, show an example, and iterate. Do that and it stops feeling like a chatbot and starts feeling like leverage.
We’re building a free library of battle-tested prompts. Want it when it launches? Get in touch and we’ll send it your way.
