160 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. 4Turns are the expensive habit. One short question and answer costs about $0.15. Nineteen turns cost $6. Forty turns cost $14. Keep Fable chats short.
  5. 5The senior lawyer rule. Fable is the lawyer at $1,000 an hour and Sonnet is the intern at $100. Pay the lawyer to set the strategy. Let the intern draft from it. The intern can read the lawyer’s memo just fine.
  6. 6Opus is my daily driver. It beats Sonnet 5 on the benchmarks I checked, and it costs less.
  7. 7Small 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.
  8. 8Effort is thinking time. Big hard task, Max. Small incremental task, Low. I leave it on High most days.
  9. 9Fable on Low works. If Fable is available, Low effort often does the job. If it isn’t, run Opus on High.
  10. 10No switching in Cowork. You can’t change models in the middle of a Cowork session. Annoying, I know. Pick before you start.
  11. 11The ladder, once. Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, then the Mythos tier. Fable-5 is the Mythos-level model. That’s the whole naming scheme.
  12. 12Model beats prompt. A lazy prompt on Fable beats a perfect prompt on Haiku.
  13. 13Check the selector. Claude remembers your last model pick. Look before every chat. I once burned Fable credits on a grocery list.
  14. 14Hard goals, two turns, downgrade. That’s the entire economics of the 5 family.
2 · Setup and settings
  1. 15No settings is the best setting. Empty your preferences, empty your global instructions, and turn nearly everything off.

145 tips to go.

Put your email in and the full list arrives in one message, usually inside a minute. This page stays blurred.

Free. One email, and no follow-ups.