If you're here, you watched my video on the three toxic Claude prompts and you commented for the rest. Here they are. Twenty more, same energy: small ways to talk to Claude that get you noticeably better answers. No filler, and I'll flag the few that come with a catch.

Quick recap of the three from the video, so this stands on its own. Tell it you talked yesterday so it stays consistent. Give it an expert persona so it structures better. Bait it with "obviously" so it pushes back instead of just agreeing. If you want the why behind those, it's in the video. Now the twenty more, grouped so you can grab what fits.

Make it think harder

1. "Ask me questions before you answer." The single best line you can paste. It turns a one-shot guess into a short back and forth, and the final answer is almost always sharper.

2. "Give me three versions: safe, bold, and weird." One pass, three angles. You almost always end up wanting a mix of the bold one and the weird one.

3. "What's the strongest objection a smart skeptic would raise?" Pressure-tests your idea before someone else does it for you.

4. "Rate your own answer out of 10, then tell me why it's not a 10." It finds its own weak spots and fixes them in the same breath.

5. "Give me examples, not just principles." Advice is cheap. Examples are what you can actually copy and use.

Stop it from agreeing with you

6. "Steelman the opposite of what I just said." Forces it off the fence and onto the other side, properly.

7. "Where am I wrong here? Be specific." Skips the praise and goes straight to the holes.

8. "Don't tell me what I want to hear. Tell me what's true." Blunt, but it works. These models lean toward agreeing with you, so you have to give them permission not to.

9. "If you're not sure, say so instead of guessing." The honest way to cut down on confident nonsense. It'll start flagging the shaky parts instead of papering over them.

Save real time

10. "Make this 30 percent shorter without losing the meaning." The edit I use more than any other. Works on anything you've written.

11. "Turn this into a checklist I can paste straight into Notion." Fuzzy task becomes something you can just start doing.

12. "Summarize this thread and tell me what actually needs my reply." Drop in a long email chain and get the gist plus the one thing you owe people.

13. "Give me a reusable template with placeholders." Stop re-writing the same email or doc. Build it once, fill in the blanks forever.

14. "Compare these options in a table with pros and cons." Decisions get easier when you can see them side by side.

Make it sound like you, not a robot

15. "Here are two things I wrote. Match my voice." Paste real samples first. It picks up your rhythm faster than any description.

16. "Rewrite this for a busy client who skims." Naming the exact reader changes everything about how it writes.

17. "Cut every word that sounds like AI wrote it." Kills the stiff phrasing, the buzzwords, and yes, the em dashes.

Get unstuck

18. "Give me the first three steps, not the whole plan." Overwhelm dies the second the task gets small.

19. "Here's what I tried and what happened. What now?" Context beats a cold question every time. Tell it the story and the next move gets obvious.

20. "What am I not asking that I should be?" The one that catches the thing you didn't know you missed.

You don't need all twenty. Pick three that fit how you work, use them this week, and they turn into muscle memory.

The pattern under every one of these is the same thing from the video. Claude gives you back what you ask for. Ask for sharper, shorter, more honest, more like you, and that's exactly what comes out. The "tricks" are really just you being specific about the behavior you want.

Go put a few of these to work and watch your chats get better.
Anir