So I've been using Claude for a while now. Sometimes it was great, sometimes just meh.

Then I learned about something called "structured prompting" and wow. It's like I was driving a race car in first gear this whole time.

Here's the simple trick. Instead of just asking Claude stuff like normal, you put your request in special tags.

Like this:

<task>What you want Claude to do</task> <context>Background information it needs</context> <constraints>Any limits or rules</constraints> <output_format>How you want the answer</output_format> 

That's literally it. And the results are so much better.

I tried it yesterday and Claude understood exactly what I needed. No back and forth, no confusion.

It works because Claude was actually trained to understand this kind of structure. We've just been talking to it the wrong way this whole time.

It's like if you met someone from France and kept speaking English louder instead of just learning a few French words. You'll get better results speaking their language.

This works on all the Claude versions too. Haiku, Sonnet, all of them.

The bigger models can handle more complicated structures. But even the basic one responds way better to tags than regular chat.