Giving Context, Examples and Constraints

The previous lesson named context, examples and constraints as building blocks. This lesson goes deeper on each, because they are where most of the quality in business output comes from. A well-chosen example can replace a paragraph of description, and a single well-placed constraint can prevent an embarrassing mistake.

Context: the facts only you know

Context is everything Claude would need to look up or ask about if it were a new team member. It falls into a few recurring categories.

• Situation: what has happened, what is about to happen, who is involved.
• History: decisions already taken, previous attempts, what was rejected and why.
• Organisational reality: how your company talks about itself, what it never says, who the stakeholders are.
• Source material: the document, data or email the task is about.

You can paste context directly, attach files, or (as later domains cover) store it in a Project so you do not repeat yourself. Whatever the channel, label it. A paste that begins "Here is the client's original brief:" is far more useful than an unlabelled block of text, because Claude then knows how to weight it.

A practical rule: if you find yourself correcting Claude's output with a fact ("no, the launch is in Q2"), that fact belonged in the prompt.

Examples: show, do not tell

Describing tone is hard. "Professional but warm" means different things to different people. Showing one or two examples of the output you want (often called few-shot prompting) removes the ambiguity. Examples are especially powerful for:

• consistent formatting (how you write meeting minutes, how you structure a risk log);
• house style (your company's voice in customer emails);
• classification tasks (two or three labelled examples of how you categorise support tickets);
• transformation tasks (one before-and-after pair showing how you tidy raw notes).

Here is a transformation prompt that uses one example.

Rewrite my rough notes into the format our team uses for decision logs.

Example of the format:
Decision: Move the weekly sync to Tuesday.
Owner: Priya
Rationale: Monday clashes with the leadership stand-up.
Review date: 1 March

Now do the same for these notes:
- we agreed to stop the pilot in Leeds, Marcus owns it, numbers were
  below target for three months, revisit after the summer

Claude will match the field names, the order and the register without further instruction. Keep examples short, representative and few. Three well-chosen examples beat ten noisy ones, and examples that contradict your written instructions will confuse the result.

Constraints: boundaries and must-haves

Constraints are rules the output must obey. They come in two flavours.

Positive constraints say what must be present: "include a one-line summary at the top", "cite the section of the policy you are relying on", "end with a clear ask".

Negative constraints say what must be absent: "do not use the word 'synergy'", "do not speculate about the cause", "do not mention pricing".

Negative constraints are useful but should be stated plainly and sparingly. A long list of prohibitions can crowd out the actual task. If you find yourself writing eight "do not" lines, consider whether a positive instruction ("write in the plain, factual style of our incident reports") would cover most of them.

Length and scope are constraints too. "Under 200 words", "exactly three options", "only use information from the attached document" each remove a decision Claude would otherwise make for you.

Before and after

A finance analyst asks for help explaining a variance.

Explain why travel spend went up.

Claude has no data and will invent plausible reasons. The improved prompt supplies context, an example and constraints.

I am writing the commentary for our monthly management report.
Travel spend was 38% over budget in September.

Context: two unplanned client visits to Singapore (approved by the
COO), plus a conference that was budgeted in October but invoiced in
September. Nothing else unusual.

Here is how commentary read last month, so you can match the style:
"Marketing overspend of 12% reflects the brought-forward Q4 campaign;
full-year forecast unchanged."

Write one or two sentences in the same style. Only use the reasons I
gave. Do not speculate about anything else. Do not mention names.

The output will be short, on-style and factually bounded.

Checklist: have I given Claude enough?

• Have I labelled each piece of pasted material so Claude knows what it is?
• Have I included the decisions and history that would change the answer?
• Where tone or format matters, have I shown at least one example?
• Are my examples consistent with my written instructions?
• Have I stated the must-haves and the must-nots explicitly?
• Have I told Claude to use only the information supplied, where that matters?

Exam focus

• Context is the set of facts Claude would otherwise have to guess; if you correct the output with a fact, that fact belonged in the prompt.
• Examples (few-shot prompting) are the most reliable way to communicate tone, format and classification rules.
• Keep examples few, short and consistent with the written instructions; contradictory examples degrade output.
• Positive constraints state what must appear; negative constraints state what must not; prefer a clear positive framing over a long list of prohibitions.
• "Only use the information provided" is a constraint that directly reduces fabricated detail.