Meet Claude (and stop worrying).
What it is, what it's genuinely good and bad at, what's safe to paste, and the one mechanical fact that explains almost everything. Ten minutes, and the nerves are gone.
Lesson 01 of 07 · ~8 min · FreeWhat Claude actually is
Think of Claude as a brilliant, fast, occasionally overconfident colleague. It has read more than anyone you have ever met, writes quickly, and never gets precious about feedback. It is also not an oracle: it can state a wrong thing beautifully, and it does not know your business until you tell it.
Two rules cover most of the worry. You are still the expert, and it is still your name on the work. Nothing Claude drafts should ship without your pass. Get those two settled and the rest of this series is just technique.
What's safe to paste?
The fastest way to feel confident is knowing where the line is. Tap each one to check your instinct.
Why long chats go stale
Here's the one mechanical fact worth knowing: Claude re-reads the entire conversation every single time it replies. Imagine a colleague who rereads every email in the thread before answering each new one. Twenty messages in, they're spending most of their effort on the reread, and the thread is full of half-relevant history.
That's why long chats get slower, vaguer and more expensive. Tokens are the currency; the conversation is the meter. Four habits fix it: one job per chat, start fresh when the topic changes, put reusable context in a Project instead of re-pasting it (Lesson 3), and don't dump a 40-page PDF in when two pages answer the question.
The fresh chat move
When a chat has gone long and woolly, don't push through. Extract and restart.
The handover prompt
Run this at the end of a bloated chat, then paste the result into a fresh one.
Summarise this conversation so I can continue it in a fresh chat. Include: the task, the decisions we've made, the constraints I've given you, and where we got up to. Keep it under 150 words.
The pre-flight check
Before pasting anything you're unsure about.
Before I share a document with you: it may contain confidential or personal information. List the types of information I should remove or anonymise first, based on what I tell you the document is.
Confident nonsense.
Claude will occasionally state a wrong thing beautifully: a made-up statistic, a plausible-sounding source, a date that's off by two years. The polish is not the proof. Anything factual that ships to a client gets checked, same as you'd check a junior's work.
Three questions, then the good bit
No marks, no sign-up, just a check the lesson stuck. Tap your answer.
Why do long chats get slower and vaguer?
A client's unpublished financials would really help the task. Paste them?
Claude states a statistic, confidently and beautifully. You should:
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