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Integrated Course
Prompting Best Practices
Claude 4.5 field guide for explicit instructions, context-aware workflows, and agent orchestration
Chapter 11: General principles (Claude 4.5)
Learning Content
Claude 4.5 models reward explicit, context-rich instructions. State desired outputs, stretch goals, and guardrails up front. When you explain why constraints matter, Sonnet and Haiku follow them more reliably.
Key Techniques
Be explicit about outputs, constraints, and stretch goals
Add motivation/context so rules feel purposeful
Align examples with the behavior you want reproduced
Spell out role, audience, format, and evaluation criteria
Common Pitfalls
Assuming Claude will infer missing context or audience
Providing examples that conflict with desired behavior
Leaving quality bars and guardrails implicit
Prompt Examples
Less effective: Create an analytics dashboard | More effective: Create an analytics dashboard. Include as many relevant features and interactions as possible. Go beyond the basics to create a fully-featured implementation.Less effective: NEVER use ellipses | More effective: Your response will be read aloud by a text-to-speech engine, so never use ellipses since the engine will not know how to pronounce them.Clarify tone and scope: Explain the audience, success criteria, and any anti-goals so Claude can optimize for them.1 / 5
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