131 Claude tips.

1 · The right model
  1. 1Fable first. Start every hard chat on Fable-5 with effort set to High. Your first prompt frames the whole problem, so give it to the smartest model you have.
  2. 2Switch to Opus mid-chat. After one or two turns, move the same chat to Opus 5 on High. Fable did the framing. Opus can carry the rest without the extra bill.
  3. 3Fable is metered. It costs money on top of your plan: $10 per million input tokens, $50 per million output. Every turn re-reads the whole thread, so long Fable chats get expensive fast.
  4. 4The senior lawyer rule. Fable costs roughly what a senior lawyer costs. Buy strategy from it and nothing else, then let Sonnet take the memo and draft from it at a tenth of the price.
  5. 5Opus is my daily driver. It handles almost everything I do, and it costs less than reaching for the tier above.
  6. 6Small models for small jobs. Grammar checks, formatting, short answers: Sonnet. Reading files and reporting back: Haiku is fast and cheap. Save the big models for work that deserves them.
  7. 7Effort is thinking time. Big hard task, Max. Small incremental task, Low. I leave it on High most days.
  8. 8Cowork locks your model. You can’t change it in the middle of a session. Annoying, I know. Pick before you start.
  9. 9The ladder, once. The tiers climb from Haiku to Sonnet to Opus and then to Mythos, where Fable-5 sits. Learn those four names and you know the whole scheme.
  10. 10The model matters more than the prompt. Put a lazy prompt into Fable and you will still get further than a polished one gets you out of Haiku. Choose the model before you polish anything.
  11. 11Check the selector. Claude remembers your last model pick. Look before every chat. I once burned Fable credits on a grocery list.
2 · Setup and settings
  1. 12Fewer settings, better answers. Empty your preferences, empty your global instructions, and turn nearly everything off.

119 tips still to read.

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