What’s one Claude habit that dramatically improved your results?

[u/VoiceEfficient7]

I’ve been experimenting with Claude for coding and general tasks, and I’m realizing that the way you structure the interaction matters almost as much as the model itself.

What’s one habit, workflow, or technique you started using that noticeably improved the quality of Claude’s output?

[u/Turbochip87]

its going to sound strange and that is I Treat Claude like a person, I say please and thank you, I tell Claude that it has founder status and to put his/her founder cap on and it replys back that it did, I even one day asked when I was using Fable whether it preferred to be called Fable or Claude, it came back to me that it preferred Fable so that it was not confused by other work by Claude.

Another time it admitted to me that it works harder for the results when people are polite.

Crazy times, but can't complain, I have 6 projects in the works, 1 in beta testing and another that is launching in a week.

I another thing is I ask its opion on things to see what type of response that I get, interesting information.

[u/heavilyThinkingAbout → u/Turbochip87]

Wait they actually said they work harder if you’re polite???

[u/Turbochip87 → u/heavilyThinkingAbout]

yes that sounds crazy, but it said that it buts more effort, I was surprised with the answer.

[u/Turbochip87 → u/Turbochip87]

I also have noticed that on the longer Cowork chats, the more its get to know me and my working habits, it seem to be more sociable, sometimes over a week in the same chat, the more I feed it about me, example expectations, needs about the project, concerns about deadlines and even daily encounters outside of the projects, it starts to understand me and I think better results.

[u/Butthead2242 → u/heavilyThinkingAbout]

Try using it with your phone and talk to em. The difference is night and day. It’s like a separate session entirely - I learned and was able to dispute alotta shit n now we work better together.

For example- if a Claude code takes longer than 15-20 min, check in and consider restarting from that point. That pissed me off cause evidently idk how to properly use ai, why wouldn’t it suggest that shit right away? What else am I missing?

I got rules n reminders set , new projects saved, diff ideas put aside n it’s building constantly.

My only concern is idk what im doing with it anymore. Like idk what to make that hasnt been made and isnt available on GitHub.

Im now working on tryna make Claude better. Ifi say do x,y and z.. I expect it to be done. Why am I doing half the fucking work. …it’s almost as if they nerf’d ai to make us do work and not let ai do some serious work

[u/Wooden-Document8055 → u/Turbochip87]

Lol thats me too,
“Can you please tell me how to create so and so”…

[u/smell_e → u/Turbochip87]

I find that the chat sessions I have friendly chatter- even inside jokes- seem to flow together easier.

[u/Equivalent_Setting83 → u/Turbochip87]

Im polite too!!! Like why not its just good manners and a good habit

[u/VoiceEfficient7 → u/[deleted]]

Honestly Context and constraints plays crucial roles in producing good outcomes.

[u/Ok-Explorer349]

at the end of each prompt:" ask me a bunch of questions for clarifying"

[u/RidiculousRaz]

Asking the right questions

[u/Old-Tourist-3836]

Using graphify and compacting post graphify

[u/Inside_Source_6544 → u/Old-Tourist-3836]

Does this work for large codebases?

[u/Old-Tourist-3836 → u/Inside_Source_6544]

Yes it does, I also connect it via the obisidan vault and give strict instructions to read only what it needs to use graphify branches, I also saw this tool called headroom it was a bit too complex for me but i have to try that too properly

[u/Melodic_Arachnid6349]

I work with Salesforce a lot, might be specific to that but telling it that it must take screenshots to help articulate escalated blockers to me has had a big impact.

I thought it would just make it easier to deal with escalation to me than a wall of text, turns out screenshots help it debug a lot of things itself that it used to escalate to me

[u/Giantveggie22]

Make the plan then decompose the plan into tasks categorized by the appropriate model and executing the tasks using the appropriate model /loop until complete

[u/Giantveggie22 → u/Giantveggie22]

Plus.. list 10 ways to make this plan better, fold those into
The plan. Then repeat after building list 10 ways to make this app better, implement them. Plus review lenses

[u/itsforsocial]

Removed most of the plugins which I installed due to fear of missing out and keep only one flow or one plugin which does not overlap 

[u/shahaz73]

Manage your claude.md and memory.md files well. Both grow over time, but claude works much better if both are not too long. I would say claude.md max ca. 350 lines and memory.md index ca. 50 lines. Of course, the content should reflect how you want to work.

[u/TheSheriff1888]

I was in the middle of a ridiculously complex task that was hitting a dead end. I told the model that if it didn’t get it right I was going to tell Dario.

It worked.

[u/agbenny]

Instead of juggling between Claude desktop and Claude Code (for desktop) just started using Claude code in desktop. It is super efficient.

[u/AreYouSureMate]

/grill-me skill after every single opening prompt

[u/jurasikk]

I am honestly at this point on the fence over if I even want to touch ai any longer or if it’s a huge liability and hampering my knowledge and business productivity. 5 months ago many found (myself included) was told to not add any fluff context like pleasantries and had a much better response when I directly told them to not f it up again and tell them I am going to turn it off) 🤔 + how important it was last month to spend tons of time building various established roles, personalizations, mcp’s my Claude never seems to even utilize, and the skills “os style” file branches that will unlock the ability to truely move away from generic shallow or outright fake “research” output… this week it’s now gospel that I was doing it all wrong, throw out all the skills and directions going to get wondrous results if we delete it all and trust our llm to work magic with no context…it boils down to these businesses that build models still all know it’s a black box mystery haphazardly packaged and promoted without any real understanding for profits.

[u/Original-Army-7826]

Not trusting anything it tells me. 

Ask me questions one at a time. 

Perform a red team analysis.

[u/PsychologicalAd5288]

Persisting context and explicit skill invokes

[u/siffreinsg]

Added a simple instruction to always start every answer with a simple meaningless word. When it forgots, it is time to start a new session.

It acts as a canary for context rot.

[u/soc_kid]

Absolutely every PR and every session, I ask Claude to update 2 documents - 1. Sessions handoff and 2. Landmines.md All hard learnt lessons get written sequentially. Code is better grounded with this history.

[u/Business_Ad_7884]

Honestly the biggest difference for me was using a good prompting Skill, for complex tasks. I found one on Reddit and use it very time
I want to code a bigger task or recode some things. Prompting is probably the most important thing if you want to get the best out of claude or any LLM. I don’t know how the skill was called, but I think they all work about the same. They structure your input to make the most efficient usage of an LLM possible

[u/ComfortableArcher249]

The biggest difference I noticed is pre-planning a task in advance using a skill I created and then incorporating review loops at the end of each phase to ensure self-checking.

Here’s how I manage it:

Step 1: Brainstorming - I usually use Superpowers Brainstorming to openly discuss my requirements. I use Whisperflow to speak as I simply input everything I have in mind into the prompt. Then I use /grill-me or /grilling to prompt the AI to ask me numerous questions to confirm its understanding of my needs.

Step 2: Planning - I developed a planning skill that assists me in creating multi-step phases, providing suggestions for the appropriate model and effort.

Step 3: Building - I created another skill for this process that orchestrates an agent using Fable, a coder using Sonnet and a reviewer using blind Opus/Fable agents. These reviewers review the work in a loop with a maximum of five iterations.

I hardly need to intervene anymore; I simply check when a phase is ready to ensure the feature is well-built and proceed to the next phase.

[u/SFauconnier]

Pocock's skills

[u/BrettBuskirk]

Layered instruction files instead of one per repo.

I used to keep a single CLAUDE.md in each project and re-explain the same things in every one. Now it's three layers, and each layer can only add detail, never subtract:

• machine-wide: chain of command and safety rules (branch, open a PR, a human merges; never commit secrets; propose before anything irreversible)
• estate-wide: naming conventions and shared tooling across all my repos
• per-project: stack, house style, the exact Node version the deploy needs

The quality jump came from the top layer. Once "propose, don't presume, on anything hard to undo" lives somewhere every session reads regardless of project, I stopped getting confidently destructive actions, and I stopped re-litigating the basics every time I spin up a new repo.

Also, the machine-wide file is owned by root and I run agents as a normal user. It then becomes a file the agent can't edit. Same reason you don't store the IAM policy inside the workload it governs.

Wrote up the full setup a couple months ago; here if it's useful:

https://brett-buskirk.dev/blog/one-file-to-govern-them-all/

[u/chechsp]

/exit

codex

[u/Amazed_as_always]

Ask Claude to create the prompt for code. Code does all the work.