// 17 tips in Prompting
Tips for writing effective prompts and instructions.
Before asking Claude to scaffold a new feature, point it at your existing code first — it will match your naming, structure, error handling, and test patterns exactly rather than defaulting to framework boilerplate.
Give Claude the full picture upfront before it writes any code, so it builds the right thing the first time with fewer correction rounds.
Complex prompts are unreadable as escaped single-liners. Use shell HEREDOCs to write clean, structured prompts directly in your scripts.
Long multi-step prompts with lots of context are harder to type than to speak — your brain can narrate relationships and constraints faster than your fingers can type them.
Use voice dictation tools like Monologue or WhisperFlow to speak prompts directly into your Claude Code terminal — Claude handles imperfect transcription better than any traditional dictation app.
Paste any cryptic regex and ask Claude to explain it in plain English and rewrite it with verbose inline comments — so you understand it when you need to change it.
Paste JSON, CSV, YAML, TOML, or XML and ask Claude to convert it — it handles nested structures, tricky edge cases, and format quirks automatically.
When a problem is genuinely hard, the word "ultrathink" pushes Claude to allocate its maximum reasoning budget before responding.
Jumping into an unfamiliar repo is painful — ask Claude to be your tour guide before you start making changes.
Stop wrestling with regex syntax — describe the pattern you need and Claude will write it, test it, and explain every part.
Once you've written the happy path, ask Claude to think of every edge case you probably haven't — then write the tests for them too.
Combine multiple @filename references in one prompt to give Claude precise, simultaneous context across related files — no describing, no guessing.