The Claude AI Community Discord is open.Join us
Courses/Claude Mastery/Prompting That Actually Works

Use examples when behavior is hard to describe

7 min readPrompting That Actually Works

If you want Claude to match a voice, format, review style or decision pattern, examples often work better than abstract instructions.

Bad vs better

  • Weak: Write naturally.
  • Better: Here are three examples of the style. Match the sentence length, directness and level of detail.
  • Weak: Give useful feedback.
  • Better: Here are two examples of feedback I consider useful and one example I consider too vague.

Few-shot style prompt

Study these examples and infer the pattern. Then produce the requested output in the same style. Good examples: [example 1] [example 2] [example 3] Avoid this style: [bad example] Task: [paste]