Fifteen practical Claude tips on briefs, context length and token costs, with caveats about the sales pitch.
Why this is useful to know
Ben van Sprundel, who runs an AI community, shares fifteen tips for Claude. The core: give the model the whole job at once instead of small separate prompts, because newer models can run a job from start to finish. Also describe when something is done, because without exit criteria a model keeps going and burns tokens. Long chats also get less sharp, well before the context window is full. The piece is practical advice from someone who works with it every day. It also sells his own skills and mods, so read it as ideas and not as proven facts.
When you need this
Does Claude lose its way halfway or cost a lot of tokens? Then a fixed brief helps: write what the job is, why you give it, which rules apply and what it looks like when it is done. For a big job, let Claude ask questions before it starts. If you have been working in one chat for a while, ask for a summary and open a new chat with that summary. If you leave a chat after a break, the next question costs more because the cache has expired. According to him, one message the next morning can cost up to 40 times as much. Do not install clean-up skills or mods before you have checked exactly what they change.
How it works under the hood
The tips revolve around the context window and the harness. According to the source, quality starts to drop well before the limit, between 200,000 and 400,000 tokens, and auto-compact triggers at 300,000 to 400,000 tokens. Subagents and side chats keep the main context clean, and /compact summarises the session. Prompt caching keeps the start of the conversation; on a subscription that cache lives one hour according to him, after which you pay full price again. Explicit exit criteria in the brief act as a stop condition. Note: the author also offers his own skills and mods, such as Cache Clock and Handoff. Check what such extensions are allowed to do before you install them.
This news touches chapter 10 and 11 and 14 of the course AI(l) or nothing by Newway. If you follow the course, this subject returns there at a calmer pace.
What you can do with this
Want to know what this means for your business? Plan an introduction: half an hour, no sales pitch, but an honest answer to the question where to begin. Rather read on first? The course AI(l) or nothing is free and starts with the basics.
Written in response to a post by Ben van Sprundel in the Ben AI community on Circle.
