When Claude hands back something you have to rewrite, there’s an obvious suspect: the prompt.
So you rewrite it. You add detail. You try phrasing it the way you saw someone phrase it online.
That works for a while. Then it stops working.
What finally moved things for me was paying attention to the opposite case: the sessions where Claude got it right on the first try.
The pattern was the same every time.
Claude had context it could reuse. The files were organized. It understood the task before starting. And the complex work was split into stages instead of one giant request.
Not one of those is a prompt trick.
They’re all good habits I’ve been following over the past few months: