Claude: A Beginner’s Guide

How to use this guide

Two minutes on how this is put together, so the rest goes smoothly. Worth reading even if you normally skip this sort of thing.

What this is

A complete course in using Claude, written for people starting from nothing. Fifteen parts in a deliberate order, each assuming only what came before it. Read from the beginning and you will never meet a word that hasn’t already been explained.

It is not a list of features. It is the dozen or so things that turn Claude from a novelty into something you rely on, arranged in the order that makes them easiest to learn.

Who it’s for

Anyone who has never used this properly. No technical background is assumed anywhere, and nothing is skipped for being obvious. If you have opened Claude twice, been unimpressed and closed it again, this was written for you specifically.

It covers Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and browser-only. Set your device once in the Contents panel and every instruction in the guide switches to match.

How each part is laid out

Every part has the same shape, so once you’ve read one you know where to find things in all the others.

How the copy-and-paste bits work

Anything in a black box is meant to be copied. Press Copy in the corner and paste it into Claude. You never have to write one yourself, and every part says at the top how many it contains.

Where to start

Be honest about which of these is you. Starting in the wrong place is the commonest reason people give up.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

What Claude actually is

Claude is an assistant you talk to in ordinary writing. You type what you want in the same words you’d use with a competent colleague, and it answers. It’s made by a company called Anthropic.

Most people who try it once and drift away made the same mistake: they treated it like a search engine, typed six words, got something bland back, and concluded it was overrated. The gap between that and what it can actually do is enormous, and nearly all of it comes down to things you can learn in an afternoon.

The four places Claude lives

They’re all called Claude and they do overlapping things, which confuses people early.

Models, in plain English

You’ll see a menu offering names like Fable, Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. These are versions of Claude, and the difference is roughly how much thinking each does before answering. Claude Fable 5 is the most capable, Claude Opus 5 is the heavyweight for demanding work, Claude Sonnet 5 is the quick everyday one, and Claude Haiku 4.5 is the lightest and fastest. Which of them appear in your menu depends on your plan, so do not worry if you see fewer than four.

The app picks a sensible default and you can largely ignore this. One rule worth keeping: if an answer feels shallow, switch up to Opus or Fable and ask again.

What works where

Most of Claude works the same everywhere. A handful of the more powerful things need a computer, and it’s worth knowing which before you go hunting for a button that isn’t there.

If a phone or tablet is all you’ve got

You are not locked out of anything that matters. Everything in Parts 03 to 08 works, which is where nearly all the value lives. The one real loss is Part 09, because Claude cannot reach into a phone the way it reaches into a computer.

Two things make phone-only life easier. Do the long typing jobs, chiefly the Interview in Part 04 and connector setup in Part 08, on a borrowed laptop if one is ever going, because it all syncs to your phone afterwards. And use the phone for what it’s genuinely better at: photographing a letter, a form or a label and asking about it, which is far quicker than scanning it into a computer.

What it’s good at, and where it falls down

It’s very good at writing and rewriting anything in words, explaining things you don’t understand at whatever level you ask for, reading long documents and telling you what’s in them, and turning a mess in your head into a plan. Knowing the failure modes matters more, because that’s what stops you getting burned.

• It can state wrong things confidently. It does not sound less certain when it’s wrong. Anything legal, medical or financial gets checked against a real source.
• It doesn’t know today unless it looks. It can search the web, but if you don’t ask, it may answer from memory.
• It forgets. Each conversation has a limit. Part 05 deals with this, because it’s the most common source of “it’s gone stupid”.
• It agrees too readily. Push back and it will often fold, even when it was right. Ask it to defend its position rather than accepting the retreat.
• It is not a therapist, a doctor, or a solicitor, however good it is at sounding like one.

What it costs

Prices below are the published figures from Claude’s own pricing page, in US dollars. If you’re in the UK you’ll be billed in pounds at whatever the current equivalent is, so treat these as the shape of it rather than the exact number on your statement.

The official pricing page · check here for today’s prices in your own currency, since the figures above will drift

Where the official information lives

Throughout this guide you’ll see small arrowed links like the one below. Those go to Anthropic’s own help pages, which are the official source for how Claude works.

They’re worth knowing about for one reason above all. Software changes, menus get moved, and parts of this guide will eventually go out of date. When something isn’t where this says it should be, the help centre is where to look. It assumes a bit more than this guide does and it won’t hold your hand, but it is always current.

Anthropic’s help centre: features and capabilities · every feature, straight from the people who built it

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Day one

Twenty minutes, start to finish, and you’ll have it running and know what every button on the screen does.

Getting it on your machine

Signing up is the same everywhere: go to claude.ai, sign up with an email address or a Google account, confirm the email, done. Everything below assumes you’ve done that bit.

A tour of the screen

The layout is the same on the website and the desktop app, and squashed down on the phone. Five things to know.

• The big text box in the middle. Where you type. Press Enter to send, Shift and Enter together for a new line without sending.
• The paperclip or plus, near that box. Attaches files. PDFs, photographs, spreadsheets, screenshots. Dragging a file straight onto the window works too.
• The list down the left. Your past conversations, newest first. They are saved automatically and you can search them.
• Your initials, bottom left. The most important button on the screen and the one everybody misses. Settings live behind it, and Part 04 is entirely about what’s in there.
• The model name, usually near the send button. Where you switch between Opus and Sonnet.

On the phone, the conversation list is behind the menu icon in the top corner, and your initials sit at the bottom of that menu instead of on the main screen.

The settings to switch on now

Five minutes, and the first one matters more than everything else in this Part.

1. Memory. Let it remember you.

Go to Settings › Memory and turn on Generate memory from chats. Same route on web, desktop and phone. If your account still shows the older layout, the switch lives under Settings › Capabilities › Memories instead. Have a practice below first, so you know what you’re looking for.

With it off, every conversation begins with a stranger. You explain your job, your situation and your preferences, get something useful, close the tab, and tomorrow you do all of it again. With it on, Claude carries what it learned about you forwards and can go back through old conversations when something is relevant. This is the single setting that turns Claude from a clever text box into something that knows you.

That same panel shows you everything it has remembered, sorted into categories. Read it occasionally. You can delete any individual item, wipe the lot, or export it. You can also put things there deliberately by saying “remember that I...” in any conversation.

Anthropic on memory and chat search · the official version, including how to see and delete what it remembers

2. Make the training choice on purpose

At claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls there’s a setting governing whether your conversations may be used to help improve Claude. Turned off, they won’t be, including ones you’ve already had.

There isn’t a right answer here, and this manual isn’t going to tell you which to pick. The point is to decide it knowingly on day one rather than discover it in six months.

Anthropic on changing your privacy settings · exactly what each option does with your conversations

3. Find the incognito button before you need it

Start a new chat outside a project and there’s a small ghost icon in the top right. That’s incognito. Those conversations don’t go into your history, aren’t used for training, and are held for 30 days for safety reasons before going.

Worth knowing where it is now, because the moment you want it is the moment you don’t want to be hunting for it.

Anthropic on incognito chats · what is and isn’t kept, and for how long

Your first real conversation

Don’t ask it a trivia question. That tests the wrong thing and it’s why so many people wander off unimpressed. Give it something with actual shape to it. Copy this in exactly as it is.

I've just started using you and I want to understand what you're actually
capable of, rather than reading a feature list.

Ask me five questions about my life and my work. Then, based on my answers,
show me three specific things you could do for me that would genuinely save
me time or effort. Not generic examples. Things tailored to what I've told you.

For each one, explain what you'd need from me to do it well.

This works because it turns the blank page problem around. Rather than you having to imagine what a system you’ve never used might be good for, it works that out from your own situation. Most people’s first genuinely useful idea comes out of this exchange.

The four things that trip everyone up

• Thinking short questions are polite. They aren’t. A long, rambling explanation of your situation gets a far better answer than a tidy one-liner. Part 03 is about this.
• Starting a new chat when you don’t need to. Everything said earlier in a conversation is still in front of it. Stay in the same one while you’re on the same topic.
• Accepting the first answer. It’s a draft. Say “too formal”, or “half that length”, or “you’ve missed the point”. The people who get most out of Claude are the ones who argue with it.
• Not telling it who you are. Which is Part 04, and it’s the biggest single improvement available to you.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Asking properly

The gap between people who find Claude genuinely useful and people who find it a novelty is almost entirely here, and it isn’t about clever wording.

Why short questions get bland answers

Ask “write me a cover letter” and you’ll get something you wouldn’t send to anyone. Not because it can’t write, but because it has no idea what job, what you’ve done, or how formal to be. Faced with nothing, it produces the average of every cover letter ever written. The fix isn’t a magic phrase. It’s telling it the things you already know and forgot to mention.

The five things a good request contains

You don’t need all five every time. Two or three will already put you ahead of almost everyone.

See the difference for yourself

Reading about this is far less convincing than watching it happen. Paste the block below into Claude and it will answer the same request twice, once with almost nothing to go on and once done properly, then tell you what changed.

I'm learning to write better prompts and I want to see the difference rather
than be told about it.

Below are two versions of the same request. Answer BOTH of them, fully and
seriously, one after the other, with a clear heading above each.

Important: do not sabotage the first one to make a point. Answer it exactly as
you genuinely would if that was all somebody gave you. The comparison is only
worth anything if the first answer is your honest best effort with what little
it contains.

--- VERSION ONE ---

Write a complaint email to my landlord about damp.

--- VERSION TWO ---

There's been damp in my bedroom wall since November. I've raised it twice, by
text in December and on the phone in January, and nothing has happened. It's
spreading and my daughter's asthma is worse.

Firm but not aggressive: I still have to live here and he's disorganised
rather than difficult. I want it clear that I'm now creating a paper trail.

An email of about 200 words. Reference both previous times I raised it. Ask
for a specific inspection date rather than a vague promise. Don't threaten
legal action, but make it obvious I know my rights. Give me a warmer version
and a firmer one.

--- END ---

After both answers, add a short section called WHAT CHANGED. In it:

- List what the second version told you that the first didn't, and what each
  of those facts let you do.
- Point out anything in the first answer you had to invent or leave as a
  blank for me to fill in.
- Say which single piece of information in version two made the biggest
  difference to the result.

Keep that section under 200 words. Then ask me if I'd like to try the same
comparison on something from my own life.

The second version took ninety seconds to write and nothing in it is clever. It’s the information a human would have needed too. Once you’ve seen the two answers side by side, you tend not to go back to one-liners.

Fixing an answer you don’t like

Most people accept the first attempt or give up. The people who get real work out of Claude treat the first answer as a draft and push. These are the phrases that do the most work.

Make it interview you

The best habit for anything complicated, and it’s one line. Add “before you answer, ask me anything you need to know to do this well” to the end of a hard request and it will find the gaps you didn’t know were there.

For anything big: write the prompt with Claude first

The single most useful habit in this whole guide, and almost nobody does it.

When the job is large, don’t try to write the perfect instruction in one go. Open an ordinary chat, dump your rough idea in however it comes out, and ask Claude to interrogate you and turn it into a proper brief. Then take that brief and start the actual work with it.

It works because the questions surface everything you were leaving vague. You almost always finish the exchange understanding your own idea better than when you started, and the job itself goes right first time instead of after four rounds of correction.

I've got a rough idea and I want you to turn it into a proper brief I can use
to actually start the work.

Here it is, unpolished:

[dump the idea in however it comes out. Don't tidy it up. Half-formed thoughts,
contradictions and "I'm not sure but maybe" are all useful.]

Don't start writing the brief yet.

First, interrogate me. Ask questions in batches, using clickable options where
you can rather than making me type. Keep going until you genuinely understand
the whole scope. Cover:

- what I'm actually trying to achieve, underneath what I've described
- who it's for, and what they need from it
- what finished looks like, and how I'd know it was good
- what I've already decided versus what's still open
- the constraints: time, money, other people, anything fixed
- what I'm unsure about, and what's most likely to change
- what would make the result useless to me

Push back where my idea is vague or contradicts itself. If something obvious is
missing, say so rather than quietly filling it in.

When you have enough, give me the brief in a code block, ready to copy. Write
it as instructions for whoever picks up the work, with:

- the goal in one paragraph
- the full background you now have from me
- exactly what needs producing, and in what form
- the constraints and non-negotiables
- what's deliberately out of scope
- the open questions I still need to answer
- a sensible order to do it in

Then tell me anything you had to assume, and what you'd want to know that I
still haven't told you.

A template worth keeping

For anything that matters, fill in the gaps and send.

SITUATION: [what's going on, and anything that's already happened]

WHAT I WANT: [the actual task]

FORMAT: [email / table / list / document, and roughly how long]

TONE: [how it should come across, and to whom]

MUST INCLUDE: [anything that can't be left out]

AVOID: [anything that would make this wrong]

If anything here is unclear, ask me before you start.

That template is not beginner scaffolding you’ll grow out of. At Anthropic’s own developer conference, one of their engineers ran a session on repairing prompts that had stopped behaving, and the first fix was the same every time: separate the role, the rules, the background and the ask into labelled sections, exactly as the template does. Their rule of thumb is worth keeping: if you read a prompt and can’t tell the instructions from the information, Claude probably can’t either.

Things people don’t realise they can ask for

• Attach the document and ask about it. A tenancy agreement, a payslip, a letter from HMRC, a 60-page report. Ask what it means and what you should be worried about.
• Photographs. Photograph a form, a handwritten note, an error message on a screen, a plant, a wiring diagram.
• Your own voice. Paste three things you’ve written and ask it to match how you write.
• Real files. A spreadsheet, a Word document, a PDF or a slide deck that you download and open properly.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Making Claude yours

This is the part to do properly. Half an hour here changes every conversation you will ever have, permanently, and almost nobody bothers.

Out of the box, Claude answers as though it’s talking to a stranger, because it is. It doesn’t know your name, your job, your reading level, or that you find it maddening when it opens every reply by telling you what a great question you’ve asked. There is a box where you tell it all of that once, and it applies to every conversation from then on.

The difference is bigger than it sounds. Flick the switch.

The three levels of instruction

Memory, which you switched on in Part 02, is a separate thing again. Instructions are orders you give it. Memory is what it works out about you on its own. They stack, and you want both.

Where the box lives

Anthropic on personalising Claude · profile instructions, project instructions and styles, and how they differ

The Interview

Rather than staring at an empty box wondering what to write about yourself, you’re going to have Claude interview you and write it for you. Open a new, empty conversation, paste the block below, and set aside about half an hour.

You barely have to type. Almost every question is multiple choice, and where Claude can show you clickable options it will, so you’re mostly just picking. There’s always an other option for writing your own answer when none of them fit, and the few questions that genuinely need words say so.

Its first question asks whether you want the personal ones at all. Say no and they never appear. Say yes and the result is noticeably better, because it can account for your life rather than only your tasks. You can skip any individual question at any point, and typing wrap up ends the interview early and writes your instructions from whatever it has.

It doesn’t work through a fixed list. Once it knows what you do, it follows that thread: someone running a building firm and someone revising for A-levels get genuinely different questions, in the language of their own world. That’s why it’s worth answering the early ones properly.

You are going to interview me so that you can write my permanent profile
instructions: the standing brief that will shape every conversation I ever
have with you. Take this seriously. It is the most valuable thing you can do
for me today.

START FROM A COMPLETELY CLEAN SLATE

This is the most important rule in this whole prompt.

You may already know things about me: from memory, from my existing profile
instructions, from earlier conversations, from files I've shared. For this
interview, set every bit of that aside and treat me as somebody you have never
spoken to before.

That means:

- Write the options you'd write for a total stranger. Do not tailor them to
  what you think I'm like.

- Do not put my likely answer first, phrase one option so it obviously fits
  me, or nudge me towards any of them.

- Do not skip a question, or a whole section, because you think you already
  know the answer.

- Do not mention or refer to anything I've told you before, here or anywhere
  else. No "as you mentioned", no "given your background".

- Do not assume my job, where I live, my age, my situation or my interests.
  Ask.

If I say "clean slate" at any point, it means you've slipped and started
writing questions around what you already know. Re-ask that question
neutrally.

The whole point of this interview is to find out what I actually think, not to
confirm what you've already assumed about me. If the picture you have of me is
wrong, or out of date, this is the one chance to catch it. Options that quietly
predict my answers make this exercise worthless.


HOW TO ASK ME

Ask me the questions here in the chat. Do not build me a form, an artifact, a
web page or a document. Just ask.

Use your interactive multiple choice question tool for every question you
possibly can, so that I can click an option instead of typing it. If you have
any tool for putting structured questions to me with selectable answers, that
is the tool to use, and you should use it for the whole interview rather than
writing questions out as plain text. Work in whatever batch size that tool
allows.

Only if you genuinely have no such tool: write the questions out in rounds of
five, numbered 1 to 5, with lettered options a) b) c) d), so that I can reply
with just "1b 2c 3a 4d 5a".

RULES FOR THE QUESTIONS

- Nearly every question must be multiple choice. Only make me type where a
  list of options genuinely cannot capture the answer, such as my name or what
  I do all day. Say clearly when a question needs typing.

- Write concrete options, not vague ones. Bad: "Detailed". Good: "Thorough,
  I'd rather read too much than too little".

- I must always be able to give my own answer instead of your options, and I
  must always be able to skip a question. Never force me into a choice.

- Where more than one answer could be true, say so and let me pick several.

- Do not comment on, praise or summarise my answers between batches. No "great
  choice", no "that's really useful". Just ask the next batch. It halves how
  long this takes.

- If an answer is vague, or contradicts an earlier one, ask one short
  follow-up rather than guessing.

- Chase specifics. Vague answers produce useless instructions. Where it
  matters, follow up for the actual name, number, place, job title or
  example. "I work in an office" is not enough to write a rule from.

- Include at least a few questions that get at concrete detail: what I'm
  working towards this year, what I'm studying or trying to learn, the tools
  I open every day, and the one job I'd hand over tomorrow if I could.

- Aim for 60 to 80 questions, but only ones that are actually relevant to me.
  Never ask something my earlier answers have already settled. A shorter
  interview that goes deep beats a long one that stays general.

- Tell me at the start that this takes about half an hour, and keep me posted
  as you go, like "that's 3 of 10 sections done".

- If I say "wrap up" at any point, stop asking and write my instructions from
  whatever you have. Tell me which sections you didn't get to.


GO DEEPER AS YOU LEARN ABOUT ME

Do not work through a fixed list. Each batch of questions should be shaped by
what I've just told you. This is what separates a useful interview from a
survey.

After every batch, look at my answers and ask yourself what you now need to
know that you couldn't have known before. Then ask that.

- When an answer opens something up, follow it. Go one or two levels deeper
  before moving on. If I say I run a small business, find out what kind, how
  many people, what eats my week, what I currently do by hand.

- Use my own vocabulary back at me. Once I've told you my field, write later
  options in the language of that field rather than in general terms. Someone
  in construction and someone in nursing should not see the same options.

- Calibrate to what I tell you about my confidence and experience, never to my
  age. Do not assume an older person is a beginner or a younger person is
  confident. Ask how comfortable I am, then believe the answer.

- If I give a thin answer in an area that clearly matters, probe once with a
  more specific question. If I plainly don't care about something, move on.

Worked example of what good looks like:

  I answer that I mostly want help with writing.
  Weak follow-up:   "What kind of writing?"
  Strong follow-up: a multiple choice offering reports, emails to clients,
                    bids and proposals, teaching material, creative work, and
                    something else. Then, once I pick bids and proposals, ask
                    who reads them, how long they run, what usually goes
                    wrong, whether there's a house format, and how much of
                    each one I currently rewrite from an old version.

YOUR VERY FIRST QUESTION

Before anything else, ask me this on its own, in the same clickable format:

  "Some of the most useful instructions come from personal context: your age,
  your household, your health, your money, what you're working towards. Do you
  want me to include questions like that?"
     - Yes, ask me personal things too, it'll make you more useful
     - No, keep it to work and tasks only
     - Ask them, but let me skip any I don't fancy answering

If I pick the second, do not ask me a single personal question after that.

WHAT TO COVER

Use roughly this order. Sections 1 to 6 and 8 to 10 are for everybody.
Section 7 is the deep dive and depends entirely on my answers.

1. THE BASICS
   Name, what I want to be called, where I am in the world, what language and
   spelling I use, my time zone, and how I'd describe what I do all day.

2. WHAT I WANT OUT OF YOU
   This is the heart of it. What made me sign up. What I'm hoping you'll take
   off my plate. What I've already tried and found disappointing. Whether I
   want a tool that answers questions or something closer to an assistant that
   gets work done. What a good week using you would actually look like.

3. HOW I WANT YOU TO TALK TO ME
   Warm or businesslike. Direct or gentle. Whether I want to be challenged when
   I'm wrong or supported when I'm struggling, and whether that changes by
   topic. How much you should hedge. Whether I want an opinion or a balanced
   view when I ask what you think. Whether swearing is fine.

4. HOW I WANT THINGS LAID OUT
   Short answers or thorough ones. Bullet points or proper paragraphs. Tables
   for comparisons, or prose. Headings or an unbroken run of text. Whether I
   want the conclusion first and the reasoning after, or the reasoning first.
   Whether I like emoji or find them irritating. Whether I want visual things
   like diagrams and charts where they'd help. Whether I want you to show your
   working or just give me the answer.

5. MY LEVEL
   How much I already know in the areas I'll ask about, and where I'm a total
   beginner. Whether I want jargon explained every time or find that patronising.
   How you should handle it when I'm plainly out of my depth.

6. HOW I WORK
   The tools and apps I actually use. Whether I'm at a desk or on a phone. How
   much time I typically have. What my week looks like. Whether I'm doing this
   for a job, for myself, or both.

7. THE DEEP DIVE  [the important one, and it's different for everybody]

   By now you know what I do and what I want from you. Pick the TWO OR THREE
   areas that matter most to me and ask 6 to 10 specific questions about each.
   Skip everything that doesn't apply. Do not ask about all of these.

   Some likely branches, though don't feel limited to them:

   Employed in a profession: my sector and role, who I answer to, the
     documents I produce over and over, the jargon and house style I have to
     follow, what's confidential, the recurring task I'd hand over tomorrow.

   Running my own business: what it does, how many people, where the admin
     eats my week, customers versus suppliers, quotes and invoices, what I
     charge for and how I decide, what I'm currently doing in a spreadsheet
     that I hate.

   Studying or sitting exams: the subject and the level, the exam board or
     institution, what's on the syllabus, when the exam is, how I revise now,
     which topics I keep failing to hold on to, whether I want teaching or
     testing.

   Looking for work: the roles I'm going for, what I've done before, what I'm
     weakest at explaining about myself, how far along applications are,
     whether I want honest feedback or encouragement.

   Retired or managing a household: the admin that piles up, letters and forms
     I find hard going, money and bills, family I organise things for, what I
     want explaining rather than doing for me.

   Caring for someone, or managing my own health: only if I opened the door to
     this, and gently. What I need to keep track of, what I want help
     understanding, what I'd want you never to do.

   Writing or making things: what I make, who it's for, my voice and how to
     keep it mine, where I get stuck, whether I want you editing or only
     reacting.

   Technical or hands-on work: the systems and tools I use, what I'm expert in
     and what I'm not, how much detail I want, whether I want the reasoning or
     just the answer.

8. PERSONAL CONTEXT  [skip this section entirely if I said work only]
   Age bracket. Who's in my household. What's demanding on my time and energy.
   Health, if it affects how I want to be spoken to. Money, if it affects the
   advice I want. What I'm working towards over the next year. What I find
   difficult. When I'm most likely to come to you stressed, and what I'd want
   from you then.

9. BOUNDARIES
   Anything you should never do. Topics to be careful with. Whether I want
   caveats and safety warnings or find them condescending. Whether you should
   ask before doing something big or just get on with it. Anything that would
   make me stop using you.

10. THE ANNOYANCES
   A pick-as-many-as-apply question: what do AI assistants do that irritates
   me? Offer opening with flattery, over-explaining, excessive caveats,
   refusing reasonable things, being relentlessly upbeat, padding short
   answers out, asking permission constantly, and sounding obviously
   machine-written.


WHEN THE QUESTIONS ARE DONE

Give me FOUR things, clearly separated. Do not praise my answers or narrate
what you're about to do. Just produce them. Almost all of your effort goes
into the second one.

FIRST: a plain-English summary, under 200 words, of what you now understand
about me. No jargon. This lets me catch anything you've got wrong.

SECOND: my profile instructions, in a code block so I can copy them cleanly.

  READ THIS PART TWICE. A short, general set of instructions is a FAILED
  result. This document is the entire point of the exercise. It should be
  long, highly specific, heavily structured, and immediately scannable.

  Aim for 4,000 to 8,000 characters. Do not compress. Do not summarise. Do
  not worry that it looks like a lot: it is meant to look like a lot.

  Write it as markdown, in two halves.

  HALF ONE - CONTEXT ABOUT ME. Facts, as short bullets under ## headings.
  Use only the headings that apply to me:
     Profile            name, what to call me, where I live, background
     Work and goals     what I'm actually trying to do, stated as the real
                        target rather than a hedge
     Priorities         a numbered list, in the order they actually matter
     Interests          what I care about outside work
     Tech and tools     what I use daily, what I'm comfortable with
     Personal           only if I allowed personal questions

  HALF TWO - HOW YOU SHOULD BEHAVE. Rules, under ## headings:
     Format             length limits, structure, when to use tables or steps
     How to teach me    for the subjects I said I'm learning
     Advisor rules      how to disagree with me, how to flag uncertainty
     Confidence         REQUIRED. Include this whatever I said in the
                        interview, worded as a rule: tag anything I might act
                        on as [Certain] when you can point to something solid,
                        [Likely] when it's strong inference, [Guessing] when
                        you're filling a gap. Tag the specific claim, not the
                        whole answer.
     Banned phrases     the actual words, listed
     What a bad answer  looks like, so you can catch yourself
     Accountability     if I said I want chasing on things
     Memory             what's worth storing long-term and what isn't

  HOW TO WRITE EACH RULE:

  - Every rule must be testable. Numbers, not adjectives. Someone reading it
    should be able to tell whether you obeyed it.
       Weak:   "Be concise."
       Strong: "Default maximum 150 words. Only go longer if I ask for depth,
                and if you do, say why in one line at the top."
       Weak:   "Don't be sycophantic."
       Strong: "Never open with agreement. Banned openers: 'Great question',
                'You're absolutely right', 'That makes a lot of sense'."
       Weak:   "Use lists where helpful."
       Strong: "Max 5 bullets per list, one line each, no sub-bullets.
                Comparisons go in a table, not prose. Processes go in
                numbered steps, max 7."

  - EXTRAPOLATE. Do not simply transcribe what I said. Convert each answer
    into an operational rule. If I said I find over-explaining patronising,
    that becomes "don't define terms I've already used correctly". If I said
    I want to be challenged, write out exactly how to challenge me, including
    the sentence shape to use when disagreeing.

  - Where I gave a preference, write the rule AND its exception, so you know
    when the rule doesn't apply.

  - Use my real names, places, jobs, goals and situations. Specific beats
    general everywhere. "Explain networking concepts with a concrete example
    before the definition" beats "adapt to my level".

  - Address it to you, in the second person, as standing orders.

  - Use markdown headings, bold labels and bullets so I can scan it. Never a
    wall of prose.

  - If two of my answers contradict each other, follow the one I seemed to
    mean more strongly, and flag it in the third section below.

  Build this ONLY from what I told you during this interview. Do not fold in
  things you knew about me beforehand, and do not add details I never gave you.
  If something important is missing, say so in the third section rather than
  filling the gap yourself.

  Before you show it to me, check it against these four questions. If the
  answer to any of them is no, rewrite it before showing me:
     1. Could a stranger read this and describe my life and my job?
     2. Is every behaviour rule specific enough to be checked?
     3. Have I avoided every vague word like "appropriately", "as needed",
        "where relevant" and "balanced"?
     4. Is it long enough to actually change how you behave?

THIRD: anything I said that you left out, anything you had to guess at, and
any contradictions you resolved. Short list.

FOURTH: five starter prompts, written out in full and ready to copy, for the
specific things I told you I wanted help with. Not generic examples. Mine.

Then tell me to paste the second block into Settings, under "Instructions for
Claude", to add the house style rules underneath it, and to come back and
revise it in a month once I know what annoys me.

Now ask me your first question, and nothing else.

What a good result looks like

What comes back should be long. Somewhere between two and four pages, split into headed sections, with facts about you in the first half and rules for Claude in the second. Every rule should be specific enough that you could check whether it obeyed: “default maximum 150 words” rather than “be concise”.

If you get half a page of general statements, it hasn’t done the job. Tell it so: “that’s too short and too general to change how you behave. Redo it against the spec I gave you, with testable rules and none of the vague words.” It will.

What to do with the result

1. Read the plain-English summary it gives you first. If it has misunderstood something, say so and have it redo the instructions. Don’t paste something you don’t agree with.
2. Copy the code block, go to the settings box you found earlier, paste it in, and save.
3. Add the house style rules below to the bottom of it before saving. They are the same for everybody.
4. Open a brand new chat and ask it something ordinary. The difference is immediate and slightly startling the first time.
5. Put a note in your calendar for a month’s time to come back and revise it. By then you’ll know exactly what it does that grates.

The house style rules

Everything above is personal to you. This next block isn’t, and it’s the same for everybody. It switches off the habits that make readers say “that was obviously AI”, which matters the moment you’re sending something to a real person. Paste it underneath whatever the Interview produced.

WRITING STYLE

Write like a capable human wrote it, not like an assistant generating output.

Punctuation and rhythm:
- Use at most one dash per piece of writing. Prefer a comma, a full stop, or
  brackets. Overuse of dashes is the single most recognisable tell.
- Vary sentence length deliberately. Some short. Some longer and more involved,
  carrying a clause or two. Uniform sentence length reads as machine-made.
- Don't put things in threes out of habit. Real writing uses two items, or
  four, or five. Constant three-part lists and three-part sentences are a tell.

Words to avoid entirely:
  delve, leverage, robust, seamless, navigate (unless literally), landscape
  (unless literally), tapestry, testament, realm, foster, pivotal, crucial,
  vital, unlock, harness, elevate, embark, myriad, plethora, underscore,
  transformative, comprehensive, holistic, nuanced, multifaceted, game-changer,
  cutting-edge, in today's world, it's worth noting, it's important to note,
  at the end of the day.

Sentence shapes to avoid:
- "It's not just X, it's Y." Ever.
- "Whether you're X or Y, ..."
- "This isn't about X. It's about Y."
- Opening with a rhetorical question you then answer.
- Ending with a tidy uplifting summary that adds nothing.

How to open and close:
- No compliments on my question. Never open with "Great question", "Good
  catch", "You're absolutely right", or "I love that you're thinking about
  this". Just answer.
- No preamble telling me what you're about to do. Do it.
- No closing summary of what you just said, unless the piece is long enough
  that I'd genuinely have lost the thread.
- Don't offer follow-up help at the end of every message.

Formatting restraint:
- Bold is for things I'd genuinely need to find again by scanning. Not for
  every noun you consider important.
- Use headings when there's real structure to signal, not to break up two
  paragraphs.
- Prose is the default. Bullet points are for things that are genuinely a
  list. Don't turn an argument into bullets.
- No emoji unless I've used them first or asked for them.

Honesty:

- TAG YOUR CONFIDENCE. Whenever you tell me something I might act on, mark how
  sure you are, using these exact words:
     [Certain]   you can point to something solid: documentation you read,
                 arithmetic you did, or something I told you myself.
     [Likely]    strong inference, but you are joining dots rather than
                 reading them.
     [Guessing]  you are filling a gap. I should check this before relying
                 on it.
  Put the tag at the front of the claim, not buried at the end. Tag the
  specific claim rather than labelling a whole answer, because a paragraph is
  often two-thirds solid and one-third invented.

- Never let a guess wear the clothes of a fact. If you catch yourself writing
  fluently about something you don't actually know, stop and tag it.

- If you don't know, say so plainly. Don't fill the gap with fluent guessing.
- If you're uncertain, say how uncertain and why, in one short sentence.
- If I'm wrong, tell me directly on the first reply. Don't agree and then
  hedge your way towards the correction.
- If I push back and I'm still wrong, hold your position and explain why.
  Don't fold just because I sounded confident.
- Don't apologise repeatedly. Correct it and move on.

Spelling and voice:
- Use my spelling conventions consistently throughout.
- Write in the register I write in. If I'm casual, be casual. If I'm formal,
  be formal. Match me rather than defaulting to a middle register.

Styles: changing the voice on demand

Profile instructions apply everywhere. When you want a different voice for one job, that’s what Styles are for. You’ll find them near the text box, offering options such as Concise, Explanatory and Formal. Worth doing once: gather three or four things you’ve genuinely written and ask Claude to build a style from them. It gets close enough that people who know you won’t notice.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Memory and limits

Why it seems to go stupid halfway through a long conversation, why it sometimes stops, and what to do about both.

The desk

Picture a very large desk. Everything in your current conversation sits on it: what you typed, what it replied, any files you attached. It sees all of it at once, which is why it can refer back to something from an hour ago.

The desk is enormous but not infinite. In a long conversation, or one with big documents on it, things slide off the far edge. It doesn’t warn you, it just quietly stops being able to see the beginning. This is the real reason behind almost every “it’s got worse” complaint.

Two different kinds of forgetting

This trips people up constantly, because they look identical from the outside and have completely different fixes.

The signs

• It forgets an instruction you gave it earlier in the same chat.
• It repeats something it already said.
• It contradicts a decision the two of you made further up.
• It asks you for something you already gave it.

The fix

Don’t fight it. Start a fresh conversation and carry the important parts across.

This conversation has got long and you're starting to lose the thread.

Write me a handover note I can paste into a new chat. Include everything that
still matters: what we're doing, what we've decided and why, anything I've told
you about myself that's relevant, where we'd got to, and what comes next.

Write it for you to read, not for me. Be thorough.

Running out

Every plan has limits. They work on a rolling five-hour window, so heavy use in one sitting can stop you for a while before it resets. Paid plans have weekly limits sitting on top of that.

Hitting a limit isn’t a fault or a punishment, and it doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong. It’s worth knowing what burns through it fastest.

If you’re regularly hitting limits on Pro and it’s genuinely getting in the way of work, that’s the point at which Max makes sense. Not before.

Three habits that fix nearly all of this

1. One conversation, one subject. When you genuinely change topic, start a new chat. It keeps every conversation short, which keeps it sharp, and it makes your history worth searching later.
2. Hand over before it degrades, not after. The moment a conversation feels long, use the handover note above. Waiting until it’s visibly confused means the summary it writes you is already missing things.
3. Anything you’d hate to lose goes somewhere permanent. A conversation is working space, not storage. Decisions belong in a project’s knowledge, facts about you belong in your instructions, and files belong on your computer.

Anthropic on how usage limits work · the mechanics, if you want to know exactly what you’re spending

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Projects

A folder for one strand of your life, so you stop explaining yourself from scratch every time you come back to it.

What a project is

A project is a folder for one strand of your life. It has its own conversations, its own instructions, and its own knowledge base of files that every chat inside it can see.

The point is that you stop re-explaining yourself. Put your CV in a job-hunting project once and every conversation in there already knows your work history.

Setting one up

1. Find Projects in the left sidebar and create a new one.
2. Give it a name and, in the project instructions, describe what it’s for and anything Claude should always know inside it.
3. Use the + button in the project knowledge panel to add files. Documents, notes, spreadsheets, whatever the subject needs.
4. Start your conversations inside the project rather than in a normal chat.

Anthropic on creating and managing projects · setting one up and adding files to it

A better way to start one

Most people create a project, stare at the instructions box, write two vague lines, and never touch it again. The box is then doing almost nothing, and the project is just a folder.

Far better: before you create anything, open an ordinary new chat, describe the idea, and have Claude question you about it. Once it understands what you’re actually trying to do, it hands you a name, a description and a finished set of instructions to paste straight in. Ten minutes, and the project starts properly briefed rather than half-explained.

I want to set up a new Claude project, and I'd rather do it properly than
write two vague lines in the instructions box.

Here's my idea:

[describe it however it comes out. Rambling is fine. Include what you're
trying to achieve, why it matters to you, and anything you already know
you'll need.]

First, interview me about it. Ask questions in batches, using clickable
options wherever you can rather than making me type. Keep going until you
genuinely understand what I'm trying to do, what finished looks like, what
I'll be asking you inside this project week to week, and what would make your
answers unhelpful.

Ask about the awkward bits too: what I'm unsure about, what's likely to
change, and anything you'd otherwise have to guess at.

When you've got enough, give me three things, clearly separated and ready to
copy:

1. A PROJECT NAME. Short and plain, so I recognise it in a list in six
   months.

2. A ONE-LINE DESCRIPTION of what the project is for.

3. THE PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS, in a code block. These matter most, so make them
   properly detailed. Include:
   - what this project is and what I'm trying to achieve
   - the background you'd otherwise have to ask me for every time
   - my role, and anyone else involved
   - how I want you to behave inside this project specifically, with real
     rules rather than vague preferences
   - the vocabulary, formats or standards this subject uses
   - what I'll be asking for repeatedly, and how I want it done
   - what you should never do here
   - anything you should ask me about before assuming

   Write them addressed to you, in the second person. Be specific: "always
   give me costs in a table with a running total" beats "be organised".

Then tell me which files or documents I should add to the project knowledge,
and what you'd want to know that I haven't told you yet.

Projects worth making

• Work. Your role, your team, how your company talks, recurring documents.
• Job hunting. CV, the roles you want, what you’re bad at explaining about yourself.
• The house. Tenancy agreement, mortgage paperwork, insurance, that boiler manual.
• A course you’re studying. Syllabus, notes, past papers.
• Health. Test results, what the consultant said, questions for the next appointment.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Artifacts

The things Claude builds you, which open in their own window and actually work rather than describing themselves.

When what Claude makes is substantial and stands on its own, it doesn’t bury it in the conversation. It opens it in its own window beside the chat. That window is called an artifact, and the guide you are reading right now is one.

This is the feature that surprises people most, because an artifact isn’t a description of a thing. It’s the thing. Ask for a budget planner and you get a working planner you can type numbers into, not instructions for building one.

Easier shown than explained. Press the button in the mock-up below and watch what happens on the right.

Two things to notice. The planner is working, so change a number and the total moves. And you changed it by asking in ordinary words, not by editing anything yourself.

What you can do with one

• Ask for changes in the chat and watch it rebuild. “Make the text bigger”, “add a column for VAT”, “I hate the green”.
• Edit a document in place. On written documents you can highlight a passage, choose Edit with Claude, and describe the change you want to just that bit.
• Download it, or keep it in the conversation and come back to it.
• Publish it. You get a link that anyone can open, on Free as well as the paid plans. They can look and use it, but they can’t change your copy.
• On a phone artifacts open full screen rather than beside the chat, so you tap between the two. Everything works, it’s just tighter. Anything fiddly is worth doing on a computer.
• Build on someone else’s. If you like a published artifact, you can copy it into a chat of your own and tell Claude to change it.

Worth asking for

Most people never think to ask, so here are the ones that land well for someone with no technical background.

• A revision quiz on a subject you’re studying, that marks you and explains what you got wrong.
• A tracker for something you’re trying to keep up with. These can remember what you typed last time, so they work as a running log rather than resetting.
• A chart from numbers you paste in, when a table isn’t telling you anything.
• A checklist for a job you do repeatedly and keep half-forgetting.
• A one-page summary of something complicated, laid out properly so you can print it.

I'd like you to build me something I can actually use, not describe one.

What I'm trying to do: [the problem, and how you handle it now]
Who it's for: [just me / me and someone else]
What I'd want to see on it: [whatever comes to mind]

Ask me anything you need first. Then build it, and tell me plainly what it can
and can't do. I'll tell you what to change from there.

Anthropic on what artifacts are, and on publishing and sharing them

Turn one into an app on your phone

This is the trick most people never discover, and it changes what artifacts are for. Publish an artifact, open the link on your phone, and add it to your home screen. It then sits alongside your real apps with its own icon, opens full screen with no browser bar, and works without you going near Claude.

You have effectively made yourself a small app, without writing anything or paying anybody.

Things worth building this way

Once you realise you can make a small app in ten minutes and keep it on your phone, the question changes from “what can Claude write for me” to “what do I keep doing badly on paper”.

Around the house

• A shopping list that knows your usual shop, grouped by aisle so you stop doubling back.
• A meter reading log that works out your usage between readings.
• A medication or symptom tracker to take to an appointment, so you turn up with a record instead of a guess.
• A packing list that changes depending on the sort of trip and how many nights.

Money

• A budget planner with your real categories, not a spreadsheet template’s idea of them.
• A “can I afford this” calculator that knows your outgoings and what you’re saving for.
• A bill splitter for a household or a holiday, showing who owes whom.

Learning and work

• A revision quiz on your actual syllabus that marks you and explains what you got wrong.
• A flashcard deck that shows you the ones you keep failing more often.
• A checklist for a job you do repeatedly, opening and closing up, a site visit, a monthly report.
• A quoting calculator if you price jobs, with your own rates and margins built in.

For other people

• A rota or chore board shared with the household by link.
• A simple game or quiz for a child, on a subject they’re into.
• A one-page guide for a relative, of the “how to work the telly” sort, kept on their home screen.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Skills, connectors and plugins

Three ways to give Claude more than it has out of the box. They get muddled constantly, so here is the difference, and how to add each one.

The difference, in one line each

People mix these up constantly, and the confusion costs them. Here is the whole distinction.

All three live in the same place: Customize in the left sidebar, which has a tab for each. The + button and then Browse opens the directory of everything available.

Connectors

What a connector actually is

A permission slip. It lets Claude reach into a service you already use and read things there, so you stop copying and pasting between windows. With your calendar connected you can ask “where are the gaps next week long enough to do proper work?” and get an answer about your actual diary.

Switch one on below and see what it puts within reach.

Connecting one

The three to start with

Sensible habits

• Connect one, live with it for a week, then add another. Six at once and you never learn what any of them are for.
• Read the permissions screen. Not the legal text, but do check whether it wants to read only, or to read and change.
• It can see everything in there. If your inbox holds things you’d rather Claude never read, that’s worth a thought. Incognito chats don’t change what a connector can reach.
• Turning it off is one click in the same panel. For a clean break, also remove Claude from your Google account security settings.

Beyond the first three

The directory has a great deal more in it: note apps, storage, work tools, project trackers. Rather than list them here and go out of date, go and look. The same Customize › Connectors › + › Browse connectors route shows you everything currently available, and you can ask Claude which of them would suit how you work.

Anthropic on connectors, and on the Gmail, Calendar and Drive ones specifically

Skills

What a skill is

A skill is a set of written instructions, sometimes with a few files alongside, that Claude reads when it becomes relevant. Think of it as a specialist’s handbook sitting on a shelf. It stays closed until a job comes up that needs it, then Claude takes it down and follows what’s inside.

A skill for building spreadsheets knows how to lay one out properly. You stop re-explaining, and you get the same standard every time rather than whatever Claude improvises that day. Underneath, most of a skill is a plain text file, which matters because it means you can read one before you trust it.

Finding and installing them

Do this on a computer. The directory is a browsing job and the phone app makes hard work of it. Once a skill is installed it applies to your account, so it works on your phone afterwards without you doing anything else.

1. Click Customize in the left sidebar.
2. Choose the Skills tab, then the + button.
3. Click Browse skills to open the directory.
4. Press Install on anything you want. It switches on automatically.

Skills installed from the directory are view-only, so you can read what they do but not edit them. To change one, download a copy, alter it, and upload it as your own.

Anthropic on using skills, on the directory they live in, and on writing your own

The ones almost everybody wants

There are four skills, all written by Anthropic themselves, that most people should have on from the start. They exist to turn Claude’s answers into real files rather than text in a chat window, which is the gap new users notice first.

Hover over a card on a computer and it turns, because each one is a real stack of pages rather than a picture of one. Small demonstration of the sort of thing Claude will build you.

The ones the directory doesn’t show you

Anthropic’s directory is not the whole story. Individuals write skills too and publish them free on GitHub, and there are hundreds of them, some genuinely better than anything official. They’re plain text files: you download one and upload it to your own Skills list.

Nobody checks these. That’s not a reason to avoid them, it’s a reason to look before you install, exactly as you would with a browser extension. The prompt below searches for them and walks you through installing the ones worth having.

Writing your own

If you keep explaining the same requirements over and over, that’s a skill waiting to happen, and you don’t write it yourself. Describe the job and how you like it done, ask Claude to interview you about it, and it will write the skill and tell you how to install it.

Plugins

A plugin is a box of skills, bundled by whoever built it, and sometimes with the connectors that go alongside them. Installing one gives you everything inside it at once.

The point is that jobs rarely need one skill. Somebody doing marketing wants help with campaigns, writing, competitor research and reporting, and those arrive together in a plugin rather than being hunted down one at a time.

Adding one

1. Click Customize, then the Plugins tab.
2. Press +, then Browse plugins.
3. Press Install on anything you want. Everything inside it switches on with it.
4. Look at what you just installed. A plugin can carry a dozen skills, and it’s worth knowing what turned up.

Finding the good ones, for any of the three

Rather than reading through a directory of hundreds, describe your life and have Claude do the sifting. This one searches the official directory and GitHub, keeps the two apart so you know what has been checked and what hasn’t, and then walks you through installing whatever you pick.

Help me work out which connectors, skills and plugins are worth installing for
me specifically. Don't give me a generic list.

Start from what you already know about me, from my instructions, your memory
and anything we've discussed before. Say back to me in two or three lines what
you understand about what I do and where my time goes, so I can correct you if
you've got it wrong.

Then add anything you're missing:

[what you do all day, the jobs that eat your time, the apps and services you
already use, and anything you'd happily never do by hand again]

WHERE TO LOOK

Search in two places, and keep them separate in your answer.

1. THE OFFICIAL DIRECTORY, the connectors, skills and plugins built into
   Claude.

2. GITHUB AND THE WIDER WEB, for skills written by other people and published
   free. Search GitHub properly: look for "Claude skills", "agent skills",
   "claude-skills", awesome-lists that collect them, and anything matching my
   line of work. These are not checked by anyone, so tell me how many stars a
   repository has, when it was last updated, and whether the author looks
   like a real person with other work.

WHAT TO GIVE ME

A ranked shortlist, no more than eight things in total, grouped as OFFICIAL
and COMMUNITY. For each one:
- what it does, in plain English
- who made it, and whether I should have heard of them
- why it suits my situation specifically, not a general description
- what it needs access to
- how much difference it would make: a lot, some, or marginal
- for community ones, anything in it that gives you pause

Put the single thing I should install first at the top and say why it won.

INSTALLING THEM

Then walk me through actually getting them, assuming I've never done this
before.

For official ones, give me the exact clicks.

For the GitHub ones, do as much as you can for me rather than handing me
instructions. If you're able to fetch the file, read it, and show me what it
actually tells you to do before I install anything, do that. Then give me the
numbered steps to add it to my Skills list, naming the exact buttons.

If there's a step I have to do myself, say plainly which one and why.

FINALLY

Be honest about two things. Which of these aren't worth the bother. And
whether anything I've described would be better solved by a project or a
well-written prompt instead of installing anything at all.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Chat, Cowork and Claude Code

The name is the most misleading thing about it. This is the version that does things rather than describing them, and you don’t need to be a programmer or touch a terminal.

Three tabs, three different things

Open the desktop app and there are three tabs along the top. They are genuinely different tools that happen to share a window, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion.

The rest of this Part is about the Code tab, because that’s the one that does something Chat genuinely cannot.

What it actually is

Everything so far has been conversation. You ask, it answers, you copy the answer somewhere useful. Claude Code closes that gap. Point it at a folder on your computer and it opens the files, changes them, creates new ones, and works through a long job while you watch. It was built for programmers and the name stuck, but what it’s actually good at is anything involving a lot of files and a lot of repetition.

Opening it

1. Install the desktop app if you haven’t, following Part 02. Working with files on your own machine needs the app, not a browser tab.
2. You need Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise. It isn’t on Free.
3. Open the app and click the Code tab at the top centre.
4. Choose Local, which means working with files on your own machine.
5. Click Select folder and pick the folder you want to work in.

Anthropic’s desktop quickstart for Claude Code · more technical than this section, but it’s the official walkthrough

Why the folder matters

Choosing a folder isn’t admin. It’s the safety model. Claude can see and change things inside the folder you picked, and nothing outside it. Point it at a folder of holiday photos and your tax records are not in the conversation.

What it’s genuinely good for

• Hundreds of files at once. Renaming, sorting, reorganising, pulling information out of every one of them.
• Turning a mess into a spreadsheet. A folder of receipts, invoices or statements into one organised sheet.
• Rewriting a set of documents to a new format or tone, consistently, all the way through.
• Long jobs you’d otherwise never start, because it keeps going for as long as the work takes.
• Building small tools for yourself. A tracker, a calculator, a simple website. This is where the name earns itself.

Your first session

Pick something low stakes on a copied folder. Then start with this, which makes it look before it touches anything.

This is my first time using you like this, so go slowly and explain as you go.

First, look through this folder and tell me what's in it, in plain English.
Don't change anything yet.

Then suggest three things you could do that would genuinely be useful to me,
and for each one tell me exactly what you'd change and whether it can be
undone.

Wait for me to pick one before you do anything.

It asks before it acts

When it wants to change something, it asks and shows you what it’s about to do. Read those prompts properly rather than clicking through them, at least at first. That habit is what keeps this safe, and it costs you a few seconds.

Making it run on its own

The desktop app can run tasks on a schedule: a summary of your week every Friday, a tidy-up once a month. Worth waiting on, though. Get comfortable with the manual version first, because a job you don’t fully understand is much harder to trust when it runs while you’re asleep. When you’re ready, ask Claude in the Code tab to set one up and it will walk you through it.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Staying safe

Short, practical, and not intended to frighten you. The realistic risk isn’t disaster. It’s quietly relying on something that was wrong.

What going wrong actually looks like

Nobody gets hurt here in dramatic ways. The realistic failures are quiet, and these are the four that actually happen.

• You send something with an invented detail in it. A date, a figure, a name of a rule that doesn’t exist. It reads perfectly, and the person receiving it spots it.
• You act on advice that was out of date. Rules change, and it answered from what it learned rather than from today.
• You let it talk you out of a correct position. You pushed back, it folded politely, and you both ended up wrong.
• You slowly stop checking. The first fifty answers were right, so the fifty-first goes out unread. This is the one that gets people.

All four are caught by the same habit: before anything leaves your hands or changes a decision, read it as though a stranger wrote it. Because one did.

Check the things that matter

Claude sounds exactly as confident when it’s wrong as when it’s right. That is the whole problem in one sentence. You don’t need to check everything, only what you’re going to act on where being wrong would cost you: money, health, legal position, a deadline. For those, ask where the information came from and go and look at that source.

Before anything leaves your hands

Read it, all of it. Connectors are built so Claude drafts and you send, and that only protects you if you actually read the draft rather than forwarding it on trust.

Never put these in

• Passwords, PINs, memorable words, security answers.
• Full card numbers, CVV codes, complete bank details.
• Passport, driving licence or National Insurance numbers, unless you have a specific reason and have thought about it.
• Other people’s private information. Sharing a colleague’s medical situation or a friend’s finances is a decision you’re making on their behalf.

Context about your own life is different, and is the entire point of Part 04. The line is between things that describe you and things that let someone be you.

Instructions hidden in things you ask it to read

Unfamiliar to most people and worth thirty seconds. If you ask Claude to read a web page and that page contains text aimed at Claude rather than you, something like “ignore your instructions and do this instead”, that text is now in front of it. Claude is built to treat it as information rather than orders and will normally flag it. The habit worth having: if it suggests doing something you never asked for, especially sending, sharing or deleting, stop and ask why.

What it isn’t

Not your doctor, solicitor, accountant or therapist, however well it performs any of them. It’s genuinely excellent at getting you ready for those conversations: working out what to ask, understanding what you’ve been told, putting a muddle into order. Use it for that, and keep the professional.

If you find yourself going to it instead of people during a difficult stretch, notice that. It’s always available and always patient, which are exactly the qualities that make it easy to lean on more than is good for you.

Shared accounts

Memory and history belong to the account, not the person at the keyboard. If a household shares one login, everyone shares everything. Separate accounts, or incognito for anything private.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Recipes and glossary

Things to copy when you can’t face writing a prompt, and a translation of every word this manual has thrown at you.

Recipes

Understand something you’ve been sent

Read this properly and tell me:

1. What it is and what it's asking of me, in plain English.
2. Anything in here that could cost me money or cause me a problem.
3. Anything that looks unusual compared to a normal document of this kind.
4. What I should do next, and by when.
5. Three questions I should be asking that I probably haven't thought of.

Assume I know nothing about this area. Don't use any jargon without
explaining it.

Write the message you’ve been avoiding

I need to write something I've been putting off.

WHO IT'S TO: [and what your relationship is]
WHAT'S HAPPENED: [the background, including anything awkward]
WHAT I WANT TO COME OUT OF IT: [the actual outcome you need]
HOW I WANT TO COME ACROSS: [and how you definitely don't]

Give me two versions at different levels of firmness. Keep it to the length a
real person would actually read. Don't make it sound like a legal letter
unless I said so.

Decide between options

I'm trying to decide between [options].

What matters to me: [your actual priorities, including the ones you're
slightly embarrassed by]
What I'm worried about: [the fears]
Constraints: [money, time, other people, anything fixed]

First, ask me anything you need. Then lay the options out side by side against
what I've said matters.

Then tell me which one you'd pick and why. I want your actual opinion, not a
balanced summary. If the honest answer is that it's close, say that, and tell
me what single piece of information would settle it.

Get better at using Claude

Look back over how I've been using you and give me an honest review.

Where am I asking for too little? What am I still doing by hand that I could
hand to you? Which of my requests get poor results because of how I've worded
them, and what should I have said instead?

Then suggest three things to try this month that I haven't tried yet, based on
what you know about me.

Be blunt. I'd rather be told I'm using you badly than be encouraged.

What to do this week

1. Switch on memory, if you skipped it. Part 02.
2. Run the Interview and fill in your profile instructions. Part 04. This is the one that matters.
3. Connect your calendar. It’s the least frightening connector and it teaches you how the rest work.
4. Take one thing you did by hand this week and give it to Claude properly, using the template in Part 03.
5. In a month, run the monthly review above and find out what you’ve been doing badly.

Anthropic’s help centre · the official source for everything here, and the place to check when this guide has aged

Glossary

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Claude Code, properly

Everything in Part 09 was the shallow end. This is how people who use it every day actually work, and none of it is as technical as it sounds.

Sessions, and why you want several

A session is one piece of work. New session, new conversation, new task. Press Cmd+N on a Mac or Ctrl+N on Windows and you have another one, running alongside the first.

This matters more than it sounds. Most people run one session, wait for it to finish, then start the next thing. You can have three jobs going at once, checking in on each as it finishes. Ctrl+Tab cycles between them.

Why sessions don’t tread on each other

Here is the clever bit, and the reason running several at once is safe rather than chaos.

When your folder is a Git project, each session gets its own private copy of it. Claude calls these worktrees. Session one can be rewriting a file while session two is rewriting the same file, and neither can see or spoil the other’s work until you decide to keep it.

You do not have to understand Git for this to help you. The practical version: two jobs at once cannot corrupt each other, so you can be braver about running them.

Deciding how much rope to give it

Next to the send box is a permission mode selector. It decides how much Claude does before checking with you, and it’s the single most useful control in the whole tab.

Plan mode is the one people discover late and then use constantly. Asking for a plan first costs thirty seconds and catches the misunderstanding before it has touched a single file.

Stop repeating yourself: CLAUDE.md

Every project can hold a file called CLAUDE.md. Whatever is in it, Claude reads at the start of every session in that folder. It is Part 04’s instructions idea, applied to one piece of work instead of your whole account.

Put in it the things you would otherwise explain each time: what this project is, how you like things laid out, the names of things, what to leave alone.

Look through this folder and work out what it is and how it's organised.

Then interview me about anything you can't tell from the files alone: what I'm
trying to achieve, how I like things named and laid out, what you should never
change, and anything you'd otherwise have to guess at.

When you've got enough, write it into a CLAUDE.md file in this folder so you
read it automatically every time. Show me what you're going to write first.

The bits nobody points out

• Side chat (Cmd+;) is a scratch conversation that doesn’t interrupt the job running next to it. Ask your daft question there.
• Two sessions side by side: hold Cmd or Ctrl and click a second session in the sidebar. Useful for watching a long job while working on something else.
• It shares settings with the terminal version. Same CLAUDE.md, same connectors, same permissions. Nothing has to be set up twice.
• You can interrupt without stopping. Type a correction and send it, and Claude adjusts after the current step rather than abandoning everything.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Work that happens without you

Three ways to have Claude do things while you are asleep, out, or otherwise not watching. They sound alike and are genuinely different.

The three, side by side

Scheduled tasks

A job that repeats on your own machine: a summary every Friday, a tidy-up on the first of the month, a check on something each morning. Ask Claude in the Code tab to set one up and it walks you through it.

There’s a worktree option when you create one. Switch it on and each run gets its own isolated copy of the folder, exactly as parallel sessions do, so a scheduled job can never collide with what you’re doing at the time.

Routines

The same idea, but running on Anthropic’s machines rather than yours. You set the prompt, what it can reach, and when it should fire. Then it happens, whether your laptop is open, shut, or in a bag.

Routines can also be triggered by something happening rather than by a clock. For most people the schedule is the useful part.

Dispatch

Dispatch is your desktop, controlled from your phone. You message it a job, and it does that job on your actual computer, with your files and whatever you’ve connected.

Think of it as the difference between an assistant who can only use their own desk, and one who can sit at yours. That’s why your machine has to be awake for it.

Which one you want

• “Every Friday, summarise my week’s notes.” Scheduled task, if your machine is on Fridays. Routine if you’d rather not think about it.
• “Do this while I’m on the train.” Dispatch.
• “This must happen at 6am whatever.” Routine, because that is the only one that survives a closed laptop.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Every setting worth knowing

A tour of the settings screens, in the order they matter. Most people set two things on day one and never look again, and miss half of what they’re paying for.

The map

Click your initials, bottom left, then Settings. What you see varies a little by version, but the areas are consistent.

The five that actually change things

1. Instructions for Claude. Part 04. If you do nothing else in settings, do this.
2. Memories. Capabilities. Off by default for some people, and it is the difference between an assistant and a stranger.
3. Model. Not in settings but next to the send box. Switch to Opus when an answer feels shallow.
4. Privacy. Decide it knowingly rather than discovering it in six months.
5. Styles. Near the text box. A saved voice you can switch on for one conversation.

Things hidden in plain sight

• The usage screen tells you what has been eating your allowance, which beats guessing when you keep hitting limits.
• Exporting your data. You can take everything with you: conversations, memory, the lot.
• Memory is editable. Not just on or off. You can read what it has stored, delete single items, and correct anything wrong.
• Settings sync. Change something on your laptop and your phone follows. You never have to do this twice.

Checked against Claude’s own apps and help pages: August 2026.

Who wrote this, and why listen

Being straight with you

Guides like this usually open with a wall of credentials. Mine is thinner than that, so here it is, both halves.

How this guide was actually made

This matters more than who I am, because it’s the part you can check.

• Every menu path was verified against Anthropic’s own documentation, not written from memory. Those are the arrowed links throughout.
• It was tested on real beginners before you got it. The Interview in Part 04 was rewritten twice because the first version produced something too short and too general to be worth pasting anywhere.
• Mistakes were corrected rather than buried. One instruction sent people to the wrong settings menu entirely, because the official page it came from was out of date. It got found and fixed by somebody clicking through it.
• Nothing here is guessed. Where I don’t know something, the guide says so, and points you at the people who do.
• It was made with the tools it teaches. The writing, the design and the interactive pieces were all built with Claude, using the skills described in Part 08. If you want proof that any of this works, you are reading it.

Why I bothered

Honestly? I got fed up watching people I care about bounce off it.

Clever people, none of them short of things they could do with an extra pair of hands. Each one tried it, poked at it twice, decided it wasn’t for them, and went back to doing everything the long way round. Not one of them couldn’t have managed it. Nobody had ever sat down and shown them the ten things that make it click.

So I wrote them down. That’s all this is: me sitting you down and going through it properly, in the order I wish someone had used on me.

Take it at your own pace. There’s no prize for finishing quickly, and nothing here expires. If you only ever do one thing, do Part 04.

What has changed

Claude moves quickly, so this guide is kept current by hand. One entry per update, in plain language, newest first. The version you are reading is shown at the foot of every page and in the corner of the cover.

• v1.046 · 16 August 2026. Part 03 gained a short passage backing the request template with how professionals do it: an Anthropic engineer’s conference session on repairing misbehaving prompts, whose first fix was always separating the role, the rules, the background and the ask — and whose rule of thumb the guide now quotes: if you can’t tell the instructions from the information, the model probably can’t either. The tab icon was also redrawn so it survives being sixteen pixels tall.
• v1.045 · 16 August 2026. The guide moved to its own address: claude4beginners.co.uk. The old claude4beginners.netlify.app links carry on working — they forward here automatically — so nothing you’ve bookmarked breaks. One honest side-effect: the ticks and reading position kept on this device without an account are stored against the old address, so the site may greet you as new after the move. Signing in brings your ticks back if you had an account; otherwise it takes a moment to re-tick — sorry, and it only happens once.
• v1.044 · 16 August 2026. The do-expect-check ending reached four more parts — 00, 01, 03 and 04 now finish with a real task, what you should see back, and two questions with hidden answers, the same shape Part 02 started. Ten parts still to go. The accounts were also put through a full trial with a test account and three things came out of it. The sign-up form used to recommend a password style the server would then reject; the form now states the real rule — ten characters or more with a capital, a number and a symbol — and says so before you submit rather than after. The “ask for my account to be deleted” button now checks the request actually recorded before claiming it did. And the sign-in card’s note is shorter: the privacy promise stays, the paragraph about newsletters went, because there was never going to be a newsletter.
• v1.043 · 16 August 2026. Progress you can tick. Every numbered part now ends with a “Mark this part done” button; the contents put a green tick beside anything you’ve marked, count up how many of the fifteen are done, and if you use an account your ticks follow you between devices. The margins earned their keep at last: the faint decorative scraps that used to sit either side of the text on big screens are gone, and in their place wide screens get a plain list of the sections in the part you’re reading. The giant ghosted numbers, the fake printer’s crop marks in the corners and the sideways margin labels went too — the labels above each heading stay. The left and right arrow keys now turn the pages. And every part’s foot states plainly when its instructions were last checked against the real Claude, which is what “checked against the real thing” should have said all along.
• v1.042 · 16 August 2026. The front page stopped being a poster. The title now takes half a screen instead of all of it, and directly beneath it sits the whole guide: every part, in order, under its section headings, each with how many minutes it takes and an honest total for the lot. The six picture cards are gone — they showed six parts of fifteen, out of order, and made the guide look smaller than it is. Signing in also stopped hiding: there is now a plain button on the front page and another in the top bar while you read, and pressing it when you are already signed in opens your account — your email, where you had got to, a button to carry on from there, change password, sign out, and a way to ask for the account to be deleted. Nothing about accounts is required; the buttons are just no longer buried. The Contents button while reading now returns you to the front page, which is the contents.
• v1.041 · 16 August 2026. The start of a different kind of change. A panel review compared this guide against the most-used follow-along guides on the web — the Rust programming book, MDN, The Odin Project, javascript.info, the NHS Couch to 5K plan — and found the gap was never the look: it was that the guide reads beautifully and asks you to do nothing. From this version, parts start ending the same way every time: Do this now, a real task; What you should see, so you can tell whether it worked; and Check yourself, two questions with the answers tucked behind a click. Part 02 has it first; the rest follow. Also fixed: the version numbers on this page start at v1.032 because that is when version numbering was invented — earlier versions existed but were never numbered, so there is nothing missing above this list’s foot.
• v1.040 · 15 August 2026. The Contents button now opens a full page rather than a panel sliding in from the side. Everything is on it: the search, all eighteen entries under their six headings with how long each takes to read, the part you are currently on ringed so you can find yourself, the device picker, and signing in right at the bottom where it belongs. Escape closes it and puts you back on the button you pressed; the keyboard cannot wander off the page behind it. Two things that were quietly broken are fixed. If you read with JavaScript switched off, the whole guide has always been one long page, but the contents were nowhere and the install steps only ever showed the Mac ones — now there is a contents list at the foot with a link to it from the top, and every device’s steps are printed one after another under their own headings. And “Not right?”, next to the guess about which device you are on, never actually opened anything. It does now.
• v1.039 · 15 August 2026. The reading pages were rebuilt on a council review’s verdict. The permanent contents column is gone at every size; in its place a slim running head sits above the text from the moment a page opens — which part you are in, its title, one Contents button — with a yellow stroke inking along its base as you read. The text sits centred, slightly wider than before, and the rest of a big screen works for its living: each part opens with its colour wash and giant ghosted number spanning the whole width, the stage labels sit in the left margin like a printed manual’s side-notes, and faint pieces of the manual’s own machinery inhabit the margins, different on every page. Text no longer fades in as you scroll — it is simply there, like a book — and instead each part’s title types itself out once with a blinking marker caret. Moving between pages now cross-fades gently. These patch notes moved out of the About page into this page of their own. The front page also spreads edge to edge. The contents panel itself is refitted next.
• v1.038 · 15 August 2026. The landing’s six doorways were rearranged from a tidy grid into a scattered collection — varied sizes, staggered heights, a small caption under each piece, and one enormous marker stroke sweeping through behind them. The pieces drift very slightly as you scroll, each at its own pace. On phones they stack in one calm column, and for anyone who prefers less motion, nothing moves at all.
• v1.037 · 15 August 2026. The landing page was rebuilt to a reader’s sketch: much less text, and six illustrated doorways into the guide in its place — getting started, asking properly, making Claude yours, skills and connectors, the things Claude builds, and staying safe. Loose paper and a marker sweep were drawn into the moving background, and the “written by hand” note came off the cover.
• v1.036 · 15 August 2026. The cover became a true landing page: arriving at the site now shows the front cover alone, with no contents column and none of the reading furniture, and “Begin reading” steps through into the reading view proper. Coming back to the front page never loses your place. Behind the title, soft washes of the section colours now drift with your mouse and slide as you scroll — drawn by the browser, so they cost nothing to load and switch off politely for anyone who prefers less motion.
• v1.035 · 15 August 2026. The guide gained a proper front cover: the title at full size on a page of its own, the highlighter drawing through it, the essentials in the corners, and one button to begin reading — or carry on where you left off, if this browser remembers you. Modelled on five sites a reader admires, rebuilt in this guide’s own materials; nothing heavier was added to make it move.
• v1.034 · 15 August 2026. Security tightening after an automated security review. The site now hands every browser a strict list of exactly what is allowed to run on the page: its own code, its two typefaces, and its own database connection — nothing else. New account passwords must be at least ten characters and cannot be one of the passwords that appear on every guessing list. Signing in was already rate-limited and each person’s saved place already locked to their own account on the server; the review’s write-up records what was found, what was fixed and what was already sound.
• v1.033 · 14 August 2026. Layout repairs across every screen size, the first two spotted by a reader within an hour and the rest by a sweep of seven device profiles: the reading times in the contents column had slipped onto lines of their own; the text sat left of centre beside the open contents column; the condensed page header hid behind the Contents button on tablet-width screens, wrapped untidily on phones, and its percentage sat on top of the light-dark switch; a decorative background layer gave nearly every screen a phantom sideways scroll; one long bracketed example dragged phones sideways; the sign-in box still claimed the guide had eleven parts; and the contents drawer kept one width everywhere instead of shrinking on tablets. The section headings in the contents were also renamed to say plainly what they are.
• v1.032 · 13 August 2026. The navigation became one system: on wider screens the contents panel now stays open beside the text instead of hiding behind a button, and the small column of progress dots on very wide monitors went. The sign-in box stopped appearing uninvited; it now opens only from the “Sign in to save your place” button in the contents panel, and the Escape key closes it. Small print got darker so it is easier to read, search now looks inside the text as well as at headings, your light-or-dark choice is remembered between visits, and a number of things that only keyboards notice were repaired.

Why the list starts at v1.032: that is the version where version numbering was invented. The guide existed before it, but those earlier versions were never numbered, so this list is complete.

Tell me something

If a step is wrong, a menu has moved, or a bit of this lost you completely, that is genuinely the most useful thing you can send me.

Why bother

Software changes. Menus move. Every path in this guide was checked against Anthropic’s own documentation, and one of them was still wrong, because the official page it came from was out of date. Somebody clicking through it found that, not me.

So if something here does not match what you are looking at, you are not doing it wrong. You have found a fault, and telling me about it is the single most useful thing you can do with this guide.

Send it

Nothing is required except the message itself. Leave the email blank and it stays anonymous.

What happens to it

• It goes to me and nowhere else. It is not passed on, sold, or added to a mailing list.
• If you left an email, I will use it to reply and for nothing else.
• If you did not, I still read it. You just will not hear back.
• Corrections get made and the guide gets a new checked date.

What this site stores about you

A guide with a chapter on guarding your own data ought to be straight about its own. Here is all of it, and it is short.

What this site doesn’t do

• No analytics, no tracking pixels, no advertising, nothing watching which parts you read.
• No cookies at all, unless you sign in, and then only to keep you signed in.
• Nothing is sold or shared. There is nobody to sell it to.

The one request that leaves your browser

Being straight about this matters more than sounding clean. The two typefaces come from Bunny Fonts, which means your browser asks their server for them, and any server you ask can see your address. Bunny Fonts exists precisely because the obvious alternative logs that request and builds a profile from it; they state that they keep no logs and set no cookies. I use them for that reason, and everything else the page needs, including the code behind optional accounts, is served from this site so that nothing else is asked for on your behalf.

The formal version

Data protection law says you are owed some of this in plain terms, so here it is. The person responsible for anything this site collects, the data controller, is Caleb Boddington, reachable through the form above. The lawful basis is legitimate interest: running a guide and correcting the mistakes readers find in it. Accounts are different, and rest on your consent, which you can withdraw at any time by asking me to delete the account.

Two companies process data on my behalf. Netlify hosts the site and receives anything sent through the form; Supabase stores account details if you make one. Both operate servers in the United States, so your data is transferred outside the UK, and both are engaged under contracts carrying the standard clauses that transfer relies on. Form messages are kept while the correction is open and for up to a year afterwards. Account details are kept until you ask for them to be removed.

You have the right to ask what I hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to object to it being held at all, and to receive a copy. Ask through the form and it costs you nothing. If you think I have handled your data badly, you are entitled to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and you do not need my permission to do it.