claude-prompting-best-practices changedbuild-with-claude/prompt-engineering/claude-prompting-best-practices
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2424| Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 | [Prompting Claude Fable 5](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-fable-5) | Differences from Claude Opus 4.8: effort levels, instruction following, long-run progress claims, memory systems, and the `reasoning_extraction` refusal category. |
2525| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | [Prompting Claude Sonnet 5.5](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-sonnet-5-5) | Differences from Claude Sonnet 5: effort calibration, initiative and scope, running without up-front thinking, JSON output on reasoning tasks, user-facing progress updates, tool use in chat, mid-turn user messages, verification on coding tasks, tool-call handling, complex visual inputs, and safeguard refusals. |
2626| Claude Sonnet 5 | [Prompting Claude Sonnet 5](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-sonnet-5) | Differences from Claude Sonnet 4.6: response length, effort and thinking-depth calibration, tool use triggering, literal instruction following, and design and frontend defaults. |
27| Claude Opus 5.5 | [Prompting Claude Opus 5.5](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5-5) | Differences from Claude Opus 5: effort calibration, prompts written for thinking disabled, user-facing progress updates, safeguard false positives, and tools for complex visual inputs. |
27| Claude Opus 5.5 | [Prompting Claude Opus 5.5](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5-5) | Differences from Claude Opus 5: effort calibration, prompts written for thinking disabled, user-facing progress updates, safeguard refusals, and tools for complex visual inputs. |
2828| Claude Opus 5 | [Prompting Claude Opus 5](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5) | Differences from prior Opus models: response length and verbosity, user-facing progress updates, written deliverable length, task scope and over-verification, subagent control, and self-correction. |
2929| Claude Opus 4.8 | [Prompting Claude Opus 4.8](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-4-8) | Response length, effort and thinking-depth calibration, tool use triggering, literal instruction following, subagent control, and design and frontend defaults. |
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327327* **More conversational:** Slightly more fluent and colloquial, less machine-like
328328* **Less verbose:** May skip detailed summaries for efficiency unless prompted otherwise
329329
330This means Claude may skip verbal summaries after tool calls, jumping directly to the next action. If you prefer more visibility into its reasoning:
330This means Claude may skip verbal summaries after tool calls, jumping directly to the next action. If you prefer more visibility into its work:
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332332```text Sample prompt wrap
333333After completing a task that involves tool use, provide a quick summary of the work you've done.
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776776If you are not using extended thinking, no changes are required. On Claude Opus 4.6 through Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 4.6, thinking is off when you omit the `thinking` parameter. On Claude Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5, thinking is on by default when you omit the `thinking` parameter. On Claude Opus 5, you can disable it only at effort `high` or lower. On Claude Sonnet 5.5, the lowest thinking setting is `between_tools`, accepted at effort `high` or lower. On Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5, Claude Mythos 5, and Claude Opus 5.5, thinking is always on, regardless of whether you set the `thinking` parameter.
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778778* **Prefer general instructions over prescriptive steps.** A prompt like "think thoroughly" often produces better reasoning than a hand-written step-by-step plan. Claude's reasoning frequently exceeds what a human would prescribe.
779* **Multishot examples work with thinking.** Use `<thinking>` tags inside your few-shot examples to show Claude the reasoning pattern. It will generalize that style to its own extended thinking blocks.
780* **Manual chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting as a fallback.** When thinking is off, you can still encourage step-by-step reasoning by asking Claude to think through the problem. Use structured tags like `<thinking>` and `<answer>` to cleanly separate reasoning from the final output. On Claude Opus 5, prefer keeping thinking enabled at a lower effort level instead: with thinking disabled, the model can occasionally emit internal XML tags into its visible output, so see [Running with thinking disabled](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5#running-with-thinking-disabled) before applying this pattern there.
779* **Multishot examples work with thinking.** Worked examples in your prompt shape how Claude approaches similar problems in its own thinking blocks. Present each example as a problem, the method to apply, and the expected answer.
780* **Manual chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting as a fallback.** When thinking is off, you can still encourage step-by-step reasoning by asking Claude to think through the problem before it answers, and to put the final answer in `<answer>` tags so you can extract it. On Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Opus 5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, rely on thinking instead, at a lower [effort](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/effort) level if cost or latency matters: a prompt that asks the model to write out its reasoning, for example in `<thinking>` tags, may be declined. See [Keep reasoning in thinking blocks](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/refusals-and-fallback#keep-reasoning-in-thinking-blocks).
781781* **Ask Claude to self-check.** Append something like "Before you finish, verify your answer against \[test criteria]." This catches errors reliably, especially for coding and math. Claude Opus 5 is the exception: it verifies its own work well without explicit instruction, and verification instructions carried over from prompts tuned for earlier models can cause over-verification, adding tokens and latency. On Claude Opus 5, remove these instructions rather than rewriting them. See [Task scope and over-verification](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5#task-scope-and-over-verification).
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783783<Note>
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11101110 </Card>
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11121112 <Card title="Prompting Claude Opus 5.5" icon="terminal" href="https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5-5">
1113 Behavioral differences and prompting patterns for Claude Opus 5.5, covering effort calibration, thinking always on, progress updates, safeguard false positives, and visual inputs.
1113 Behavioral differences and prompting patterns for Claude Opus 5.5, covering effort calibration, thinking always on, progress updates, safeguard refusals, and visual inputs.
11141114 </Card>
11151115
11161116 <Card title="Prompting Claude Opus 5" icon="terminal" href="https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5">
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