Claude | Field Guide

Updated for Opus 5 — Anthropic's flagship at half of Fable 5's price. New chapter breaks down the benchmarks, the pricing shift, and what it means for you.

The Claude Guide is a practical operator's manual for getting real results from Claude.

Not a cheerleading pamphlet. Not a skeptic's takedown. A field manual built on one premise: Claude is an exceptionally powerful reasoning and generation engine that performs best when you treat it like a capable collaborator, not a magic oracle.

WHAT'S INSIDE:

The Honest Architecture — What Claude actually is under the hood, what it excels at, and its structural limitations. Knowing the difference is worth more than any prompt trick.

The Signal vs. The Noise — A clean filter separating prompting advice that actually moves results from the cargo-culted folklore. Context beats credentials every time.

The Operating System Approach — Stop using Claude as a search engine. Start using it as a co-processor. Document-first workflows, adversarial passes, translation layers, and system prompts that work.

The Meta Rules — Seven operating principles that apply regardless of what you're using Claude for. You are the editor, not the audience.

The Model Lineup — A reference guide to every current Claude model: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, and Fable. What each is built for, when to go up, when to go down, and how to cascade them in production.

Building With Agents — What agents actually are, how to design them well, when they're overkill, and a five-step framework to build your first one right.

Whether you're a solo operator, a developer building on the API, or someone who wants to get more from their daily Claude use — this guide gives you the honest picture and the practical tools to work with it.