Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
Getting Good Work from Claude: Instructions for Claude, Task Briefs and Verification Habits
The way to get usable work from Claude is to put rules that hold in every conversation into Instructions for Claude, job-specific context into a project, and the task itself into a brief made of goal, context, constraints, output format and an ambiguity rule. The personalization layers, how Claude picking its own tools affects the brief, a bad and a good brief for a Bookstore campaign e-mail, and three verification questions to ask before using an answer.
Writing Prompts for LLMs (1): Clear Instructions, Delimiters and Few-shot
A prompt is a specification: context, task, input, format and constraints. We compare a bad and a good prompt on the same review with token counts, separate instructions from data with delimiters, and see with real gemma3:4b output how few-shot examples fix a classifier and how they mislead it.