Advanced Claude — Book 1 · Prompt Architecture

A good brief stops being enough when the task is complicated, the stakes are real, and the same prompt has to work again next month. This book replaces the paragraph with a specification: six labelled blocks — role, task, context, input, output spec, constraints — each one readable, obeyable and editable on its own. Why XML tags are the right tool and headings are not. The ordering rule that Anthropic measures at up to 30% better response quality on complex multi-document work. Output specifications that say what to do rather than what not to do, and that specify the negative case so a weak answer is allowed to be weak. Grounding long-document work in extracted quotes. And the four attacks that turn a prompt that works into a prompt that holds.