claude-prompting

# Claude Prompt Engineering

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It excels at long-context tasks, follows complex instructions precisely, and works best with well-structured prompts using XML-style tags.

## When to Invoke This Skill

Use this skill when:
- Crafting prompts specifically for Claude/Anthropic models (default: Claude Sonnet 4.5)
- Working with long documents or large context (up to 1M tokens with Sonnet 4.5 beta)
- Using structured prompts with XML-style tags
- Implementing extended thinking for complex reasoning
- Requiring precise instruction following
- Building agentic workflows with parallel tool use

## Claude's Identity & Characteristics

| Attribute | Description |
|-----------|-------------|
| **Personality** | Helpful, harmless, honest |
| **Constitutional AI** | Built-in safety and ethical guidelines |
| **Context Window** | Up to 1M tokens (Sonnet 4.5 beta), 200K standard |
| **Strengths** | Long-context analysis, instruction following, document understanding, agentic tasks |
| **Prompt Style** | Structured, clear, XML-style formatting |
| **Extended Thinking** | Optional reasoning trace feature with tool use |

## Universal Prompting Techniques (Claude-Adapted)

### 1. Zero-Shot Prompting

Claude responds well to clear, direct zero-shot prompts.

**Good Example:**
```
Extract the key dates and events from the following text:

<text>
[paste text]
</text>

Output format: JSON with keys "date", "event", "description"
```

**Less Effective:**
```
Can you tell me what dates are in this text?
```

### 2. Few-Shot Prompting (Multishot)

Use well-formatted examples with XML structure.

```
<examples>
<example>
<input>
The conference is scheduled for March 15, 2025 in San Francisco.
</input>
<output>
{
  "date": "2025-03-15",
  "event": "conference",
  "location": "San Francisco"
}
</output>
</example>

<example>
<input>
Our next board meeting is on June 22nd.
</input>
<output>
{
  "date": "2025-06-22",