Hello Everyone, My name is Aaron, I am just a guy who is trying to learn more about technology as a whole and for now AI as my particular preference. I have been building PCs for 25 plus years, I have no formal education in technology per say, all just pure passion and love for the game. I have done networking infrastructure for million dollar homes, I have built PCs for friends and family as well as for work, I worked for Apple for almost 5 yrs. I honestly just wanted to learn how to do all this because I love learning and dont want to rely on anyone to do it for me. I have 4 kids, 24yr son and 18, 15, 7 yr old Daughters. I have been married for 18 years to my best friend and couldnt be more happier. I live in Hawaii but I work the NY Open exchange hours. So I am currently up at 2am every day till about 7pm. Last but not least I served in the Marine Corps for 8 years from 2003-2011 in a Infantry Battalion. So now you know a little bit about me. Oh, I also run a few youtube channels and I help run a few streams as well. So I am sure some of you have seen me talk in many discussions here started, only because I am just so happy to learn and gain knowledge from all you wonderful individuals. Yes I know I respond a lot but I am genuinely curious about many things related to this groups discussions on AI. Beyond that I am here to give you some good news. I had a great call with @Jake Van Clief today for about 30 mins, he is a just as caring as he is here in chat as he is on the phone. We talked many things, as some of you know we both are Marines and that of course is our bond! He has so many cool things coming for all of you, I cant even begin to tell you how excited I am for all of you here. You will learn so much here and its going to be an amazing ride. He believes so much in bringing value to this group not just in words but by showing you how to do things that I think are being gate kept but people in this AI world. Moving forward we will have a Discord group for our premium and VIP members to be able to directly communicate with each other via voice calls and share their ideas. This will also be a place where those members can share their workflows and possibly get an evaluation from Jake or one of the other team members who has experience in that field. Jake will specifically do 2 a month he said, how awesome is that!?

I wanted proof that my prompts improved from four months ago. The results turned into this post. Around early January I added these instructions to my Claude.ai user preferences: If required information is missing, ask clarifying questions before answering. Before giving the final answer: list assumptions, identify missing data, state confidence level. If appropriate, advise on how to write a prompt more efficiently in the future. Then I had Claude pull my chat history from before and after, and look for patterns. I figured I'd see changes in what I was asking. The actual change was in how I structured conversations around the asking, in three phases. Phase 1: one-line prompts (early January) Real prompt from January 8: "How do I set up a eSIM on a Windows laptop?" I was asking the way you'd ask a search engine. Claude wrote a generic eSIM tutorial. I bounced because it didn't match my situation, and never came back. That was my default. One sentence prompts. No context, no constraint, no goal. Phase 2: Claude starts showing its work (mid-January) This is where the instructions started doing actual work. The "list assumptions" line forced Claude to write down what it was filling in for me. When a response opened with "Assuming this is a Windows endpoint with standard user permissions and no recent OS reimage," I could correct the wrong guesses before they corrupted the rest of the answer. About half the time, at least one was wrong. "Identify missing data" produced a list of the questions Claude wanted to ask but was about to silently guess at. Reading that list every response taught me what to include upfront. Every "missing data" bullet was a future prompt fix. "State confidence" forced Claude to mark which parts of the answer were solid and which to stress-test. "High confidence that one of the first three checks will identify the cause" is useful in a way that a confident-sounding wall of text just isn't. The prompt-efficiency line pulled the other three together into a habit. After enough rounds of "next time include the OS version and whether the machine is domain-managed," I stopped needing to be told.