What you put into an AI assistant, known as the prompt, has a significant impact on the quality of the response you receive. Fortunately, prompting is not as complicated as it might sound. When you're prompting, think about four things:

• What you want: what are you actually trying to achieve with this task?
• Context: who's involved? What's the situation? Where are you?
• Format: how do you want the response? Bullet points? Long and detailed? A document with references and citations?
• Tone: serious and professional, or casual and friendly?

A real example

Let's look at a simple example. Imagine your boss sends you a PDF report and asks for a summary. A basic prompt might be:

Summarize this report

Claude will generate a summary, but it may be too generic, detailed, or unfocused. A better prompt provides task, context, format, and tone:

I need to summarize this report for my boss, Chris. He prefers short bullet points and is mainly interested in the financial details. We work at an accounting firm with 50 employees. This is an internal email, so keep the tone conversational and the bullet points brief