1. Have a clear plan or goal and stay laser-focused on it (does not apply to brainstorms) - This helps prevent getting distracted by all the shiny objects (i.e., ideas and all the words Claude and other LLMs are happy to give you). I also share my goal with Claude at the start—and remind it along the way.
  2. Conduct pilots - When I'm working on a large, complex project, I test smaller ideas before rolling out across the project. This does a few things: clarifies my thoughts, refines my approach, and limits the blast radius of mistakes. By preventing errors or bad ideas from being applied at scale, I reduce the number of rollbacks and save tokens.
  3. Perform sweeps - For multi-layer or multi-faceted projects, rather than perfect every idea before moving on to the next, I get the basic ideas down, then refine using layered sweeps. I give Claude 1–3 tasks to perform across the entire project or body of work. Then, rinse and repeat (as needed). This is how I get consistent and cohesive results. Also, this generally reduces the number of LLM calls.