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Claude prompting practices

Official Claude guidance covering clear instructions, examples, output formats, tool use and agentic systems.

What it is

A useful starting point—not another unexplained bookmark.

Anthropic’s prompting guidance covers the patterns used to make Claude follow a task reliably, including clear context, examples and explicit output requirements. It also includes guidance relevant to tool-using and agentic systems.

Useful for

When to use it

  • Designing prompts for Claude-powered features
  • Improving format and instruction following
  • Building prompts that use tools or long context

What you will find

Inside the resource

  • Clear instruction patterns
  • Examples and structured context
  • Output-format guidance
  • Prompting considerations for tools and agents

Quick start

How I would use it

  1. 01

    Define success

    State the task and what a correct, useful response looks like.

  2. 02

    Organize the context

    Separate instructions, source material and user input so each role is unambiguous.

  3. 03

    Show a good example

    When format or judgement matters, include a representative input and ideal output.

  4. 04

    Evaluate, then revise

    Use a set of realistic test cases instead of changing a prompt after one disappointing response.

Ready?

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Where to go next

Next step

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