Prompting is the New Thinking
Learning Smarter with Claude AI
One good thing about my second year of business school is that I have no midterms.
That gives me more time to yap with classmates and pursue side quests like representing Anthropic at Stanford as a Claude Student Ambassador.
Doing that role in parallel to my dual education master’s program has given me the space this quarter to think about and document how I use Claude to learn.
I wanted to distill some of the best practices I’m adopting as I think about how I want to engage with these platforms to learn faster and more deeply.
On campus, we talk a lot about how AI is transforming industries and economies. But what fascinates me more is how it’s changing us; the ways we think, learn, and communicate with the world.
This essay is my attempt to make sense of that shift; and to share what’s been working for me in using AI chatbots like Claude to learn faster and think more deeply, without outsourcing the thinking itself.
Using Curiosity to Fuel Your Understanding
With how powerful AI chatbots like Claude are at conducting extensive research, performing complex calculations, and creating multimodal content, they’re practically begging to be used as homework answer vending machines.
But using Claude as an answer bot is a short-termist approach to learning. You limit the full power of the chatbot and, more importantly, the full potential of your mind.
When you use Claude to co-construct understanding through an exchange of thoughtful questions rather than as an answer machine, you eventually start thinking like an expert, not just imitating the thinking of one.
Weak Prompt: “What’s the answer to problem 3 on my Microecon assignment?” *attaches file*
Strong Prompt: “I’m trying to understand what question 3 in this Microecon assignment means by demographic dividend. How’s that similar to or different from the same mental model for financial dividends?” *attaches file*
Using curiosity-driven prompts transforms Claude into a friendly thinking partner that sharpens your thinking rather than replaces it. That back-and-forth friction is what makes what you learn stick.
Using Analogies to Sharpen Your Intuition
If curiosity breeds depth, analogies breed breadth. The school term moves really fast, and we don’t always have the time (or confidence) to dive deep into a topic we’re confused about to find mental models from other disciplines that can help us better understand it.
This is where AI chatbots like Claude can really shine as they can leverage their vast corpus of knowledge to draw parallels between distant domains to help translate the same idea across multiple domains.
Weak Prompt: “Explain chemical equations and how to balance them.”
Strong Prompt: “I’m trying to understand chemical equations and how to balance them. Can you explain it using parallels from basketball concepts?”
When you ask Claude to explain complex ideas through analogies, you’re teaching your brain to see connections between seemingly unrelated things, which is the essence of creative intelligence. You also make it easier for yourself to understand unfamiliar concepts by looking through the prism of familiar ones.
Using Targeted Practice to Build Confidence
Learning science shows that one of the most powerful ways to learn is through error analysis (reverse engineering what you got wrong and correcting it from first principles) and the way to keep the wheels of learning turning is progressive overload (slowly increasing the difficulty of your training).
Claude excels at this because, from your responses, it’s able to thoughtfully explain where you went wrong and how you can get back on track. It can also adapt the difficulty of the training content it creates as your performance improves.
Weak Prompt: “I don’t get factorials. Can you explain it to me?”
Strong Prompt: “I just started learning about probabilities. I get XYZ so far and how it applies to ABC, but I’m stuck on factorials. Can you help explain it simply and in a way that builds on what I already know so far?”
For me, confidence comes from familiarity, not certainty. With each practice that exposes my weak spots, I see that studying isn’t about being right all the time; it’s about understanding why you’re wrong, and becoming a little less wrong each time.
Using Claude ‘Artifacts’ to Personalize Your Learning
Claude’s Artifacts let you create custom tools that are perfectly tailored to how you learn. And the best part is that they can be interactive!
To create an Artifact, you just describe to Claude what you want it to build, what content should be embedded, and how the two should interact. I’ve used Artifacts to create everything from flashcards for understanding NPC intelligence in gaming to an app to teach me the basics of mixology.
Claude’s Artifacts are game-changing for personalized learning. Instead of having concepts passively explained, you can create a personalized learning environment with Claude, built around your unique cognitive makeup and learning preferences.
Using Claude ‘Projects’ to Create Your Learning Environment
While Artifacts let you build custom tools for individual sessions, Projects take this personalization even further by creating a persistent learning space across multiple conversations
Think of a Claude Project as your dedicated learning space. You can set up instructions that shape how Claude teaches you whether that means being more Socratic, asking you to attempt problems before revealing solutions, or adapting to your specific learning style.
Claude Projects is designed to help you learn smarter through:
One-shot learning instructions: By setting your learning goals once while setting up the project, there’s no need to remind Claude at the start of every chat whether you want long/short explanations, prefer being prompted with questions/analogies, etc.
Consistent reference files: When you add knowledge to the project by uploading textbooks, lecture notes, problem sets, or any other stuff, Claude references them across all conversations within that project, creating a cohesive learning experience.
Projects also work really well now with Claude’s memory feature, creating a learning environment that alongside you while maintaining the structure and resources you need.
Key Insight: Prompting is the New Thinking
I’ve found that when I write a detailed prompt that explains what I know, what I don’t know, what I’ve tried, and what kind of help I still need, I’m not just chatting with Claude, I’m actually clarifying and extending my own thinking.
The process of drafting the prompt itself is a form of metacognition (thinking about my own thinking). The thing with weak prompts is that they’re vague; and they’re vague often because the thinking behind them is vague.
I’ve come to believe that good prompting is just good thinking made legible.
Good prompts are specific because the thinker has done the work of diagnosing where they’re stuck and what they need to get unstuck within the boundaries of what they’re working on. That kind of engaged learning is what transforms rookies to pros in just a few hours of smart AI prompting.
From observing what prompts give me the most insightful responses from Claude, I created a personal prompting framework called TUGS to help me get better answers and deeper understanding from AI tools like Claude.
TASK: What am I working on?
UNDERSTANDING: What do I think I already know?
GAP: Where exactly am I stuck?
SUPPORT: Do I need questions, examples, explanations, practice, debugging?
The other reason I named the framework TUGS is that, for me, prompting (especially with Claude) feels like a tug-of-war with my mind.
It’s a whole new way of learning for me, where it feels like I’m actively constructing knowledge by wrestling the ideas out of my mind with a thought partner rather than passively absorbing it.
Final Thoughts: Using Claude Honestly
I want to name the elephant in the room: intellectual integrity.
Claude makes it easy to look smart, but that’s not the point. The goal isn’t to make AI think for you; it’s to make you think with it.
“esse quam videri” / “to be, not to seem”
This is the guiding principle for how I approach learning with AI. It should help me be smart, not just seem smart.
Everything I’ve described here is about using Claude to deepen your understanding, not to bypass the learning process. There’s a very clear line:
On the right side of the line are:
Using Claude to understand concepts
Getting help debugging your thinking
Creating custom study materials
Practicing with generated problems
Building projects to test your understanding
Over the line are:
Submitting Claude’s work as your own
Using Claude to complete assignments you’re supposed to do by yourself
Getting solutions to homework problems without attempting them
We’re the first generation of students to study with a ‘second brain’.
How we use that gift will shape not just what we know, but who we become.
Good prompting isn’t about getting the right answer. It’s about becoming the kind of thinker who knows the right questions to ask to extract insight as efficiently as possible.
That’s how to Claude.
#KeepThinking #Claude #Anthropic #AI #ClaudeAtStanford #Stanford #ClaudePartner
proofread with ❤️ by Jeremiah Nnadi + Adebayo A. + Olaoluwatomi Adesina (安天美), PMP + Rishabh Jha + Oluwasanmi Micheal-Giwa