Claude Models, Prompting & Context Engineering

Select appropriate Claude models based on trade-offs

Choose relative model tiers by task difficulty and risk, weighing latency and unit cost at expected volume — and revisit when evals or SLAs change.

Design system prompts, templates, and guardrails

Write system prompts and templates with explicit criteria, formats, and boundaries — and place hard must-always rules on deterministic tool-path controls, not prompts alone.

Apply prompt engineering techniques (zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought)

Apply zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought by failure mode — pick the lightest technique that fixes the problem and earns its tokens under latency SLAs.

Optimize context windows and manage token usage

Budget tokens by layer, keep transactional facts durable, watch position effects, and trim tool results with structured retention — never dump corpora.

Implement prompt reuse strategies (caching, modular prompts, Skills)

Reuse prompts via caching, modular shared instructions, and Skills that isolate verbose workflows — keeping live turns lean instead of inlining everything.