How Anthropic engineers actually prompt Claude Code: 4 rules and 2 patterns
tibo_maker · x · 2026-10-13
Austin Marchese studied everything Anthropic engineers have published about Claude Code and distilled it into "4 rules and 2 patterns," concluding that almost everyone is prompting Claude Code wrong.
The layer shift: move from prompting the model to building Skills — the app layer on top of agents. "Anthropic is building the phone; you create the apps."
Four rules:
- Prompt skills, not Claude: for repetitive work just type /draft-email instead of rewriting long prompts;
- A skill is more than a prompt: description, step-by-step instructions, and tools (scripts, API calls, reference files) — tools are where most of the leverage lives and where most people stop short;
- Composable, not custom: one giant skill becomes unmanageable; split it into small skills that can call each other;
- Skills get smarter every session: prompts vanish when the chat closes, skills persist — after each run ask "is this a one-time fix or should this live in the skill forever?"
Two patterns:
- Save scripts inside skills: if you can use code instead of AI, you should — deterministic scripts save tokens and are reliable;
- Control who invokes what: user-invocable: false hides a skill from the slash menu (agents only), while disable-model-invocation restricts it to the user — ideal for skills that send messages or deploy to production.
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