Claude isn't a tool. It's a hire you train.
Most people prompt Claude like they're pulling a lever on a vending machine. Input, output, next. Then they wonder why it stays flat. The shift is simple. Treat Claude like a new employee. A collaborator you invested in. Someone you teach how you work, what you care about, what breaks you. Every session becomes an upgrade. The next session feels like Claude shipped a new version. It didn't. You did. I'm chronically dyslexic. Walls of text are invisible to me. I'll scroll past four critical flags and only catch one. So I said it out loud. I told Claude: "I missed three of the four content moments you gave me. I can't read walls." That was the input. Here's what came out of it, written into memory, applied in every session since: Every response ends with a bold decision marker. DECISION, QUESTION, or NO DECISION NEEDED. Content moments go at the top in a dedicated block. Never buried. Max three lines per paragraph. Bullets aggressive. Bold keywords inside sentences so my eyes have skim anchors. Status and decisions never mixed. Skimmable first, decision clean. I didn't get a better model. I taught the model I had. The mechanism Claude has a memory system. User profile, feedback, project context, references. Every correction, every working pattern, every "do this, not that" can be saved to disk and reloaded next session. The weakness becomes the protocol. The friction becomes the fix. The next session opens with it already loaded. That's why it feels like an update. You gave feedback once. It holds forever. The reframe Stop prompting. Start defining how you work. Tell Claude what frustrates you. Tell it what a good response looks like. Tell it your constraints, your context, your weaknesses. Correct it when it misses. Confirm it when it lands. You're not using a tool. You're onboarding a collaborator. The people who get nothing out of Claude are the people who never told it anything. // A<3