Claude 4.7 does what you type, not what you meant. AI Central's ten rules for great Claude prompts turn that single behavioural shift into a working method: name the output, name the order, name the length, name the tone, and stop letting the model fill your gaps. The three corrections that change results fastest are that negative instructions fail, that the model does not reason unless told to, and that any prompt written twice should become a skill.
Reviewed August 2026, against Claude 4.7 behaviour as AI Central describes it.
What actually changed, and why your old prompts got worse
Every one of AI Central's ten rules rests on one claim about the newer model: it is more literal than the version before it. Where earlier releases inferred the missing half of a request, this one executes the text in front of it and nothing more.
Old Claude guessed what you meant.
That line is the tenth and final rule in AI Central's list, and it is really the first. Everything above it is a consequence. If the model no longer infers, then every preference you leave unstated, length, order, tone, format, becomes a coin flip. AI Central's remedy is a fixed sequence to spell out on every serious request: output first, then order, then length, then tone, then format. The closing warning is blunt. If you do not say it, you do not get it.
Rule one, name the boundaries as well as the task
AI Central opens with naming, and the instruction is broader than it first sounds. Name the scope, name the output, name the order, name the boundaries. Four things, not one. The worked example is a contract review, written as four separate commands: review this contract, flag risks from one to five, suggest one rewrite per risky clause, return it as a table.
What makes the example worth copying is not the contract. It is that AI Central never uses one sentence where four will do. Each sentence closes off a decision the model would otherwise make on your behalf. The risk scale is fixed rather than invented, the rewrites are capped at one per clause rather than left open, and the container is a table rather than whatever prose the model reaches for. Three coin flips removed before it starts.
The length problem is inherited, not random
AI Central's second rule explains a failure most people blame on the model itself. Claude sizes its answer based on what it thinks you want, which means a long input plus the word summarize reliably produces a long summary. Length is inherited from what you paste in unless you override it.
The correction AI Central gives is two moves, not one. Say short, and name the format. Asking for brevity without a container leaves the model guessing at what short means, and its guess is anchored to your input. Naming the container, five bullets, one paragraph, a table with three columns, sets a hard ceiling that the word short never does on its own.
Why don't is the weakest word you can put in a prompt
The third rule is the one AI Central states most flatly. Negative instructions do not work, because the model follows the literal words. The example pair is deliberately mundane. Do not write, do not use jargon. Write instead, write in plain English a 16-year-old could read aloud.
The reason this rewrite outperforms the prohibition is structural. A ban names something to avoid and leaves the target unspecified, so the model still has to invent what you actually wanted. The positive version names the target directly, and it comes with a built-in test. You can read the output aloud and know within a sentence whether it passed. That is the pattern to generalise from AI Central's rule: every prohibition you are tempted to write can be rewritten as a description of the thing you do want, and the rewrite is almost always more testable.
Verbs, tools and reasoning, the three levers most people leave off
Rules four, five and eight are the operational core, and they share a logic. Each one is something the model will not do unless you ask. On phrasing, AI Central is dismissive of the polite request. Can you help me with the email goes nowhere. The replacement is a chain of commands: go to my Gmail, find the contact, write the reply, under 90 words, tone confident and casual.
Each verb ships something
That is AI Central's summary of the mechanism, and it is a useful test to run over your own drafts. Count the verbs. A prompt with one soft verb produces one soft answer. A prompt with four hard verbs produces four completed steps.
On tools, AI Central notes that 4.7 calls fewer tools than 4.6 did, so anyone who relied on the older model reaching for search on its own will see it stop. If you want tool use, ask for it explicitly, in their example by telling Claude to use web search aggressively and verify every claim with at least two sources. On reasoning, the point is sharper still. AI Central says the model does not think by default, a behaviour Anthropic calls adaptive thinking, and recommends appending a single line to the end of the prompt: think before answering, maximum reasoning. AI Central calls it a free upgrade, every time.
Tone is a sample, not an adjective
AI Central's sixth rule describes the default register plainly. Claude 4.7 is direct, uses almost no emojis, and has none of the great question energy that made older assistants exhausting to read. If that default does not suit the job, the instruction is not to describe the voice you want but to supply it. Paste two or three sentences written in that voice, and tell Claude to match the rhythm.
This is the difference between specification and demonstration. Adjectives like warm, punchy or authoritative mean something different to every reader, and to the model. A sample needs no interpreting.
The seventh rule is the shortest and the oddest. AI Central points to one sentence taken from Anthropic's own documentation, go beyond the basics, and recommends dropping it onto any creative task.
Drop it on any creative task. Works every time
That is AI Central's verdict. It costs five words, cheap enough to test on your next creative brief and judge for yourself.
When a prompt earns a permanent home
The ninth rule is the one with compounding returns, and the one most people skip. AI Central defines a skill simply, as a command with the instructions already built in, and gives a threshold for creating one.
If you write the same prompt twice, make it a skill.
Twice is a low bar on purpose, and AI Central's stated payoff is hours saved. The deeper argument is about quality rather than speed. A prompt retyped from memory degrades a little each time, because you drop the clause about format, or forget the reasoning line. A saved skill preserves the version you already tuned, which means every improvement you make is permanent instead of temporary. Rules one through eight are how you write a good prompt once. Rule nine is how you stop rewriting it.
What to do with this today
The fastest way to test AI Central's rules is to take one prompt you already use regularly and rebuild it against five checks, in this order.
- Name the output before anything else, including the format you want it returned in.
- Set the length explicitly, and pair the word short with a container such as five bullets or one paragraph.
- Find every negative instruction and rewrite it as a description of the result you want.
- Replace soft requests with hard verbs, one verb per step you expect to be completed.
- Add the tool instruction and the maximum reasoning line at the end, since neither happens by default.
Run the old prompt and the rebuilt one on the same input, compare, then save the winner as a skill. That last step turns a one-off improvement into a permanent one.
Why does Claude ignore my instructions telling it what not to do?
Because it follows the literal words, according to AI Central's third rule, and a prohibition never names the thing you actually want. Rewrite the ban as a positive description of the target. Instead of banning jargon, ask for plain English a 16-year-old could read aloud.
How do I stop Claude giving me a wall of text?
Say short and name the format in the same breath. AI Central's point is that Claude sizes the answer to what it thinks you want, so a long document plus the word summarize returns a long summary. The format name is what sets the ceiling.
Does Claude 4.7 think through problems on its own?
Not by default, in AI Central's account. The behaviour is called adaptive thinking, and the fix is one line at the end of the prompt asking it to think before answering at maximum reasoning.
Why does Claude search the web less than it used to?
AI Central states that 4.7 calls fewer tools than 4.6. The workaround is to request tool use directly, for example by telling it to use web search aggressively and to verify every claim against at least two sources.
When should I turn a prompt into a reusable skill?
AI Central sets the threshold at the second time you write it. A skill is a command with the instructions pre-built, so saving it preserves the tuned version rather than making you reconstruct it from memory each time.