October 6, 2026
Prompt Claude like a colleague: set the goal, effort, and how to check the result
For most tasks, the recommendation is to tell Claude what outcome you want and let the model work out the detailed plan.
Boris Cherny
@bcherny
I'm surprised that people are surprised by how I write prompts for Claude. Talk to Claude the way you would talk to a colleague. There's no secret to prompting. For most tasks, you don't need a complex structure or detailed instructions for every step — give Claude a goal, and it will figure things out. In the Sonnet 3.5 days, your prompt made a big difference. Now it's much more important to tell the model: 1. What you want it to do 2. How much effort it should spend 3. How to check that it has done everything correctly
Boris Cherny @bcherny
Prompt
· 33K views
The recipe for a Claude prompt comes down to 3 points: what to do, how much effort to spend, and how to check the result.
In the Sonnet 3.5 days, prompt wording had a bigger impact on the result. The recommendation now is different: talk to the model like a colleague and set the requirements for the task instead of giving detailed instructions for every step.
With this approach, Claude figures out how to achieve the goal itself.
Source