I use these 5 clever Claude prompts every day — they make me feel like a genius

Claude has always occupied a slightly unusual place in the crowded world of AI chatbots. Anthropic’s offering has cultivated a reputation for thoughtful explanations and reliability, even with the end of its safety pledge, aided in part by its “constitutional AI” approach, which trains the system to critique and refine its own responses according to guiding principles.

Claude tends to reward prompts that include a specific perspective. The trick is learning how to ask for the kind of response you want. As the examples below show, the right prompt can provide smarter answers from Claude than you might have imagined.

1. The pizza and pirates method

Claude thrives when prompts include playful constraints, which force it to invent creative metaphors. For instance, the internet is full of painfully dry explanations of blockchain technology. Most start with cryptographic hashes and distributed ledgers and ...