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Courses/Claude Mastery/Working With Claude

Ask Claude to investigate before answering

7 min readWorking With Claude

For complex tasks, the first answer is often worse than the first investigation. Ask Claude to inspect, compare or reason before it commits to a conclusion.

Investigation-first prompt

Investigate this problem before proposing a fix. Return: 1. What you inspected 2. Evidence found 3. Likely root cause 4. Alternative explanations 5. Recommended fix 6. Verification steps Problem: [paste]