Learn Claude — Part 3: Prompting, From Basics to Advanced Techniques
Prompting is the highest-leverage skill in this entire series. We'll build it in three levels — start where you are.
Level 1: The foundation formula
Every solid prompt covers four things:
Role + Task + Context + Format
❌ "Write a blog post about fitness."
✅ "You're a fitness coach who writes for busy professionals (role). Write a blog post about 10-minute morning workouts (task). Audience: office workers with no equipment, mostly beginners (context). 600 words, friendly tone, numbered exercise list (format)."
Specificity isn't decoration — every constraint eliminates thousands of wrong answers. If you learn nothing else, learn this formula. Now let's go further.
Level 2: Intermediate techniques
Few-shot prompting: show, don't describe
The single biggest upgrade from Level 1. Instead of describing the style you want, show 1–3 examples:
Rewrite product names in our brand voice. Examples:
"Steel water bottle 750ml" → "The Everyday Bottle — built for your whole day"
"Wireless mouse M2" → "The Quiet Click — work without the noise"
Now rewrite: "Ergonomic office chair X200"
Claude is exceptional at pattern-matching. Two good examples routinely outperform two paragraphs of instructions.
Structure with delimiters
When prompts mix instructions with data (a document, an email, code), separate them clearly. Claude is specifically trained to respect XML-style tags:
Summarize the customer complaint below in 3 bullets,
then classify severity as low/medium/high.
<complaint>
[paste the full text here]
</complaint>
Now "summarize" can never bleed into the complaint text, and long inputs stay unambiguous. This habit matters more the bigger your inputs get.
Positive instructions beat negative ones
"Don't be formal" forces Claude to guess what you do want. "Write like you're texting a smart friend" nails it. Say what to do, not only what to avoid.
Constrain the output shape
"Respond as a markdown table with columns X, Y, Z", "exactly 5 options, one line each", "return only valid JSON, no explanation". If you'll reuse the output somewhere (a spreadsheet, code, your blog), specify the shape and skip the cleanup.
Level 3: Advanced techniques
Make Claude think before answering
For analysis, evaluation, or anything with a judgment call:
"Before giving your recommendation, first reason through the pros and cons of each option step by step. Then give your final answer with a confidence level."
Forcing visible intermediate reasoning measurably improves final answers — and lets you audit where the reasoning went wrong when it does. (For truly hard problems, combine this with the extended-thinking toggle from Part 2.)
Prompt the reversal
Ask Claude to argue against itself: "Now make the strongest case against your own recommendation." This is the fastest hallucination- and blind-spot-check that exists, and professionals use it constantly for decisions that matter.
Meta-prompting: recursion that actually works
Claude is excellent at improving prompts — including yours:
"I want Claude to generate weekly LinkedIn posts from my rough notes. Write the ideal reusable prompt for this. Ask me clarifying questions first."
Answer its questions, get a polished prompt, save it as a template. You've just automated your own prompt engineering.
Build a prompt library
The final professional habit: stop rewriting prompts you've already perfected. Keep a note file (or, better, Project instructions — Part 6) of your proven templates: the report summarizer, the code reviewer, the email drafter. Over months, this library becomes a genuine productivity asset.
Debugging a bad answer: a checklist
When output disappoints, check in order:
Ambiguity — could my request mean two things? (Most common cause.)
Missing context — does Claude know what I know?
No example — would one sample fix the style?
Contaminated conversation — is an earlier wrong turn still in context? → edit the message (Part 2), don't pile on corrections
Wrong model / thinking off — hard problem on a fast setting?
Exercise
Take a task you do weekly. Write a Level 1 prompt, then upgrade it with one example and XML structure, then run the meta-prompting technique on it. Compare all three outputs — and save the winner to your new prompt library.
Next up
Part 4: feeding Claude real material — documents, images, spreadsheets — and running genuine data analysis with executed code.
