Tune what you ask Claude so it gets the job right more often

Claude gives a good answer, but not your answer

You’ve tried Claude and liked it. It writes well and follows what you ask. But the answers don’t quite fit your business. It answers a student’s question from general knowledge instead of your lesson, or explains something your way on Monday and a different way on Tuesday. So someone still checks and rewrites most of what it gives back.

Why Claude on its own doesn’t do the job

Claude is good at following instructions, so the instructions decide how good the answer is. Out of the box, it doesn’t know which material to trust, which questions to leave alone, or how your business talks. It will answer anyway, and the answer will sound sure.

Claude gives you places to keep instructions, like projects for your team and the setup behind an AI helper. Writing what goes in them, and testing it, is the work most small teams never get to.

How we set it up in Claude

We work with a two-person online course business that teaches bookkeeping. Their 400 students asked the same questions again and again in the course community. We set up an AI helper (the industry calls it an agent) on Claude that answers from the course material and links the lesson.

The instructions did most of the work. They told Claude to answer only from the course, to link the lesson it used, and to pass anything about a student’s own tax to a person. Tax advice that sounds right in general can be wrong for one person, so that rule stays. The founders now answer about 20 questions a week instead of 120. Read the online course story.

For every job, we work the same way. We write the instruction, run it against a batch of your past questions or tasks, and look closely at where it goes wrong. Then we change the wording, the reference material, or the hand-over rules, and run it again until the answers hold up.

When better instructions are the right call, and when they aren’t

They pay off when Claude does the same kind of job many times, whether that’s your team in a project or an AI helper answering questions all week. Each small fix gets repeated hundreds of times.

If you use Claude now and then for one-off writing, a short guide is enough. And no instruction makes Claude safe to answer questions that need a professional’s judgement about one person’s situation. Those go to a person, and we write that into the instruction.

Where to go next

See the wider better instructions service, or read about Claude. If your team also uses ChatGPT, see better instructions for ChatGPT. See how we work with coaching and online education and not-for-profits. When you’re ready, get your AI Starter Plan.