If you’ve dabbled with Anthropic’s Claude AI, these tips and tricks will help you take your work to the next level. Explore advanced features to enhance the privacy of your conversations, learn how to pick the right model for the right task and configure Claude to tailor its responses to your specific needs and preferences.
Help Claude remember important details
There are certain details you’d rather not have to repeat every time you have a conversation with Anthropic’s chatbot. These might include preferences for how you want the AI chatbot to respond to your prompts (such as “keep answers short and to the point”) or more specific details that you might want to refer to time and time again (“remember my upcoming half marathon in September”).
By default Claude will attempt to remember important details automatically based on your conversations, and you can also proactively tell it to commit details to memory. If you’d like to see the memories Claude has saved about you and edit them manually then head into the Settings menu, tap Capabilities and scroll down to the Memory files section.
Use Incognito mode for sensitive conversations
While there are some things you actively want Claude to remember, there’s also likely to be details you don’t want to see in your chat history. For those moments when you want to discuss more sensitive topics, use an Incognito chat. Anthropic advertises that Incognito chats “stay out of your history, memory, and search, and aren’t used to train Claude”. Perfect if you don’t want that conversation about picking the right engagement ring to stick around in the app’s list of recent chats.
There are some downsides to Incognito chats. For example, they won’t be able to draw upon any memories that Claude has saved about you, and you obviously won’t be able to refer back to it later if you need to recall something you discussed, such as a link to a useful website.
To launch an Incognito chat, simply start a new chat in the app and tap the small ghost icon on the top right of the screen.
Use the right model for the right task
Claude isn’t just one AI, it’s technically a family of large language models (LLMs) each with particular strengths and weaknesses. Haiku is optimised for speed over deep thinking, while Opus is the opposite, and will take much longer to think through each task you give it. Sonnet is meant as a halfway house between the two, offering a mix of speed and intelligence, while Fable is designed for intensive tasks but can incur additional costs through your account.
It can take a little bit of trial and error to work out which model and effort level works best for you, but it’s easy to switch between them – even within the same conversation – so it pays to experiment. Swap between them using the dropdown menu at the bottom of the prompt text box.
Once you’ve picked a model, you can also adjust how much Effort the LLM puts into responding to each prompt, which offers an additional way to balance responsiveness versus the quality of responses. This can be fine-tuned from within the model-selection window.
Get quicker answers to your everyday queries
When you want to jump into Claude as quickly as possible, consider setting up its home screen widget, or dropping one of its shortcuts into your phone’s Control Centre or Lock Screen. These can be used to open a brand-new Claude chat, and there are also shortcuts to jump straight into a voice conversation, or even open Claude’s built-in camera to help analyse a photo.
So the next time you find yourself trying to ID an interesting car you’ve walked past in the street, why not quickly hop straight into Claude’s camera mode to snap a pic and get some AI assistance?
Tackle bigger projects with ease
If you’re looking for help with something a little more involved, such as building a website or coding an app, Claude is packed with features to help keep your work organised and ensure you’re never more than a few taps away from chipping away at your latest and greatest ideas.
Projects, for example, allow you to bundle together multiple chats when you might want to have multiple ongoing conversations about the same overall piece of work. Think of it like a folder of files, except for AI chats. You can give Claude a single set of instructions to guide its approach to all conversations within the Project, and any files you upload (such as spec sheets) will be shared between the contained chats.
Meanwhile, if you’re getting into some serious coding on Claude’s Mac app, it’s also possible to use Claude on iOS to remotely check in on whatever you’re building on your Mac. Once you’ve got Dispatch set up, you can quickly submit your latest bug report or feature request for Claude to get to work on.