Simple Claude instructions may work better than heavy setup
Claude may not need long prompts, large skill , or heavy tuning to be useful for coding. experience: long instructions that told Claude to act like a senior software architect soon felt like wasted effort. A simpler pattern worked better: state the task and state the expected output for the session.
The output might be code, a bug fix, an investigation only, or brainstorming notes. For a personal coding project, a tracker worked as a lightweight project plan and bug list. Giving Claude an issue number and asking it to implement the task usually worked well.
Larger work was handled by asking Claude to create an epic with smaller subissues, then solving those in separate sessions. In one Fable project, asking Claude to implement the whole epic at once also produced good results.
Key points
- Long role-playing prompts felt less useful than short, clear task instructions.
- Each Claude session had a defined output, such as code, a fix, , or notes.
- were used as a lightweight plan and bug tracker.
- Big tasks were split into an epic and smaller subissues.
- Sometimes Claude handled a full epic in one session with good results.