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Claude Cookbook

platform.claude.com

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Re: Claude Cookbook

#91

Post by cloakandswagger »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #73
cloakandswagger wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As part of a previous job I needed to audit internal AI usage from a largely non-technical employee population. The prompts were, predictably, really bad. Broken English, sentence fragments, vague requests, lack of context. Yet somehow, the users always got the answer they were looking for. It might have taken a few extra turns with questions from the model, but the end result was the same. It's humbling, but a flowe…

You call that a peasant prompt, but it's actually almost perfect. Couple notes, but it's 95% of the way there. "Can a dog eat sunflower seed" is probably the perfect version, just 1 extraneous word in this version. Unless the user wanted to know if a cat could eat sunflower seed or something.

To be pedantic, these types of prompts work best when in first-person/roleplaying. So the "perfect" prompt here would be something like, "I'm a dog and I just ate 20 grams of salted sunflower seeds with the shell on. Because I'm a dog I sometimes eat things without thinking about it. I'm worried about the short and long-term physiological consequences of what I've just done..."

Re: Claude Cookbook

#92

Post by coldtrait »

mindwok wrote: post #8

Gotta be honest, almost every "how to use AI" resource seems pointless to me. I'm either going to ask the AI how to do it, or if it's about using the AI then we can just bake it into the harness or wait for Anthropic/OpenAI to do it for me because they're always trivial. All of these resources on agentic workflows, managing agent memory, harness engineering, etc. appear to just be theatre to me.

Yea i do the same. I can't be bothered to watch videos and courses on how to use claude better when I can simply ask it myself.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#93

Post by jpitz »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #83

This is definitely controversial, but I think the best CLAUDE.MD is no CLAUDE.MD at all. Every time I found myself wanting to put information into that file, I asked myself "Why isn't this already obvious from the code itself?" I don't need to tell the agent my tech stack, what DB access library I'm using, the way in which I write my tests, etc. Why? Because it's all very clearly spelled out within the code itself. I…

I don't think that is controversial.

My system CLAUDE.MD spells out my preferences in stack and architecture, and how I expect the agent to interact with me.

I have it generate a summary doc in large repos so it doesn't need to slurp in the world to review a PR or work on a corner of it.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#95

Post by rowanseymour »

mindwok wrote: post #8

Gotta be honest, almost every "how to use AI" resource seems pointless to me. I'm either going to ask the AI how to do it, or if it's about using the AI then we can just bake it into the harness or wait for Anthropic/OpenAI to do it for me because they're always trivial. All of these resources on agentic workflows, managing agent memory, harness engineering, etc. appear to just be theatre to me.

Right now I feel like I'm getting so much value out of working daily with Fable, but I'd be embarrassed to share my sessions because they're pretty much how I would talk to a colleague. Spelling mistakes and half-baked thoughts included. Gone are the formal sounding prompts and specs I was proudly writing 6 months ago. But it's getting the results.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#96

Post by rowanseymour »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #83

This is definitely controversial, but I think the best CLAUDE.MD is no CLAUDE.MD at all. Every time I found myself wanting to put information into that file, I asked myself "Why isn't this already obvious from the code itself?" I don't need to tell the agent my tech stack, what DB access library I'm using, the way in which I write my tests, etc. Why? Because it's all very clearly spelled out within the code itself. I…

I think that's something that has changed in the last 6 months. It used to be standard practice to let Claude scan everything once and describe your repo in the CLAUDE.md - the logic being you don't want to do that every time for every prompt. But now I think the tooling has gotten so good at just grepping around your repos, and maintaining memory from previous sessions, that the best practice is only use CLAUDE.md for things that aren't obvious from the code.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#97

Post by vablings »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #71
embedding-shape wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it clear that some people are better at working with/prompting LLMs than other people? Or is the idea that what you write to them and how you use them doesn't matter, it's all up to the model/harness? To me this seems clear, so then clearly this is a skill, which typically is called "prompt engineering". Specifically CoT or the other things you mention wasn't referred to as "prompt engineering" as far as I know…

I actually think that good prompting MOSTLY comes from good writing skills in general. Being able to more clearly state things to an agent, knowing what pieces of context are entirely unnecessary and which are important, having a larger vocabulary helps too. Of course, there are other areas that can improve model output (Direction rather than open-ended assistance requests, using keywords + plugins that help, the "yo…

Speaking a prompt with a long ramble is very powerful.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#98

Post by alwillis »

saberience wrote: post #76
defrost wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWiW > it's like thinking you can prompt Linus Torvalds into writing better C++ than he already can do. Linus Torvalds, the inventor (and beloved dictator) of Linux, has always been quite harsh about C++ and why he rejects it for Linux kernel development. He’s not just been very vocal about it, but also brought up some arguments against the use of C++ that are worth reviewing in detail. ~ https://medium.com/@jankamme…

I mean, the point stands. The models are beyond expert level in many areas at this point. Do you really believe that adding extra junk to your prompt is going to make the model write code better than it does already? Again, imagine going to Terrence Tao and "prompting" him to get better at Maths, do you think you can do it? What prompt would you give to him to make him produce better maths. Unless you're already a wo…

> I mean, the point stands. The models are beyond expert level in many areas at this point.

It's not that the models aren't smart or whatever; we know they're extremely capable.

There's always going to be value in being able to clearly communicate what you want the model to do, especially when the context is lacking.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#99

Post by [deleted] »

user43928 wrote: post #75
NichoPaolucci wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think that good prompting MOSTLY comes from good writing skills in general. Being able to more clearly state things to an agent, knowing what pieces of context are entirely unnecessary and which are important, having a larger vocabulary helps too. Of course, there are other areas that can improve model output (Direction rather than open-ended assistance requests, using keywords + plugins that help, the "yo…

Why not open-ended assistance requests? I ask it all the time about whether X is feasible, how we can get started on Y, and to investigate issue Z. It is working great for me in a >100k LOC project. Perhaps this works less well with weaker models. I suspect the people who say Qwen 3.6 27B is working well, are using prompts like "modify the renderThreeVars() function in rendering.py".

[deleted]

Re: Claude Cookbook

#100

Post by nullbio »

semiquaver wrote: post #94

The before and after images in “prompting for frontend aesthetics” are hilarious. Did no one look at these to make sure the skill actually improved the design? https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/coding-prompting-for-fr...

Of course not. It's vibe-slop all the way down.
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