Claude 4.x Prompt Engineering Best Practices: 7 Key Differences from GPT
Claude 4.x Prompt Engineering Best Practices: 7 Key Differences from GPT If you migrated to Claude from ChatGPT, your old prompts probably feel off. Claude 4.x (Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5) is more literal, more precise, and more obedient to the exact words you write. It won't silently generalize an instruction to other scenarios and it won't infer requests you didn't make. Here are the seven highest-leverage rules from Anthropic's official prompt engineering guide, framed against habits GPT users tend to bring with them. 1. Be explicit and ask for action, not suggestions Claude treats a prompt like a contract. "Can you suggest some changes?" gets you suggestions; "Change this function" gets you a diff. State the desired output format, length, audience, and what to leave out. ``` // Less effective Can you suggest some changes to improve this function? // More effective Change this function to improve its performance. Make these edits to...