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Did you know that 87,714 people lost their jobs to AI this year. Meanwhile Fortune 500 companies are paying a 62% salary premium to people with AI skills. Currently Claude is the competitor out there, outdoing every job you can do in seconds, but you can use it to your advantage to be the smartest and fastest in the room by making it your 2nd brain.
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Three things that save the most time. One of them corrects something almost every guide on the internet gets wrong.
Scope of this manual
This covers Claude in the browser and the desktop app — the window you type into. It does not cover the developer platform, the command line, or writing code. If a menu on your screen sits somewhere slightly different, the setting still exists: Anthropic moves things, and the names in this manual are the ones to search for.
Parts list
Check every line before you start. Nothing here is missing, and nothing here costs extra.
0 x
No coding. No folders. No credit card for the first six steps. If a line could be cut, it was cut.
Tools you supply yourself
Exploded view
Seven layers. Each one is a step in this manual. You can stop after any layer and still have something that works — but each layer removes work the layer below cannot.
Almost everyone assembles layers 1 and 2, then stops. That is the entire difference between “it’s fine” and “I could not work without it.”
What you get for each layer you actually build
How to read this manual
Rule 1
One honest warning about screenshots.
Claude’s interface changes every few weeks. Menu positions in this manual may drift; the setting names will not. If you cannot find something, search the settings for the word in bold — or ask Claude where its own setting lives.
Step 1 of 16 · Part A: the basics
Go to claude.ai in a browser.
Sign up with any email address, or continue with Google.
Verify your phone number. This is a one-time check, not a subscription.
Optional but recommended: install the desktop app from claude.com/download. Same account, faster to open, and it can work alongside the files on your machine.
Fine print: do not skip this one
The free plan gets you through step 6. Free includes the two lighter models, Haiku and Sonnet. The two heavier ones; Opus and Fable and Projects (steps 8–9) need a paid plan. Do the first six steps free, then decide. By step 7 you will know whether this is worth twenty euros a month to you, which is a much better way to decide than reading a pricing page.
→This is the part everyone already did. Keep going.
Part A · The basics - Step 2 of 16
They are not four quality levels where you always want the top one. They are four tools, and they spend your usage limit at very different speeds.
For everyday work: Sonnet 5. If you are not sure which to pick, that is the answer.
Part A · The basics - Step 3 of 16
The dial nobody touches. It lives in the same menu as the model name, one line below it. It changes how long Claude thinks before it starts answering.
Turn the dial before you change the model. It is the cheaper lever, and most people never find it.
→Same model. A different amount of thinking.
Part A · The basics - Step 4 of 16
End any request with them. This single habit does more for output quality than every prompt template you will ever download.
Type what you want. Roughly. Badly. It does not matter.
Add the five words at the end.
Claude asks you three or four things it actually needs. You answer or click through them.
Now it has a brief — and it wrote that brief itself, out of your answers.
Try it right now
Write the LinkedIn post I owe about last week’s launch. Ask me questions first.
Part A · The basics - Step 5 of 16
Copy · paste template
I need [thing] so that [outcome]. Done means [specific, checkable target]. Here is what you need: [paste it]. Plan your approach first, then draft. Ask me questions first.
What comes back when you ask for the goal instead of the task
The mechanism
A task has one right answer, so Claude produces it and stops. A goal has trade-offs, so Claude has to surface the trade-offs — and the trade-offs are the part you were actually being paid to think about. You end up making a decision instead of proof-reading a draft.
→A task gets you one step. A goal gets you the finished work.
Part A · The basics - Step 6 of 16
Why a long chat gets worse, not better
Fine print — the mechanism
Claude has no memory inside a conversation. On every turn it re-reads the whole thing from the beginning. By turn forty, your actual question is a footnote at the end of a novel, competing for attention with thirty-nine turns of abandoned drafts. That is why long chats start ignoring your rules: not stubbornness, arithmetic.
Six steps done. Your free edition ends here - exactly where Part B: Make it yours begins.
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Investors face critical questions about the sustainability of major AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are heavily reliant on funding from tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. UBS estimates that a significant portion of Google Cloud’s revenue will come from these companies, raising concerns about their profitability and long-term viability. The reliance on a narrow customer base for revenue creates risks, as these firms are burning cash and may struggle to meet future demands. The potential for a market correction looms, especially with OpenAI’s delayed IPO, which could signal deeper issues in the AI landscape. Watch the video
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Generative AI Could ‘Invent’ Biological Discoveries That Don’t Exist - An AI system could help scientists identify a promising new drug. But it could also convince them that a biological effect exists when it... Read more
As Colorado universities align with AI, students take a stand against ‘plagiarism machine’ - Mirakle Wright thought her peers’ opposition to generative artificial intelligence in a world increasingly beset with the technology evoked... Read more
Suspected AI use is the entertainment industry’s scarlet letter - The slightest hint of generative AI usage is fast becoming a kiss of death in creative circles. Why it matters: It’s turning into a purity... Read more
Can you tell when content is made by artificial intelligence? - An AI-generated poster for the Ohio State Fair is at the center of a growing debate over the use of artificial intelligence in art... Read more
The creatures born from code: Generative AI threatens to upend citizen science records - You need to tread carefully among the leaf litter of the Indonesian scrubland and its tropical rainforests. The dead leaves might seem... Read more
Stanford Evo 2 AI model generates phages against E. coli - Stanford researchers have synthesized nearly 300 phages from DNA sequences produced by the Evo 2 generative AI model... Read more
Bernie Sanders has AI policy all wrong - His criticisms are responding to industry hype, not the real harms of generative AI... Read more
Google Search Console Shows AI Mode Queries, Not In Generative AI Reports - While the Google Search Console generative AI performance reports do not share query data, you can still try to figure out which queries are... Read more
GenAI war continues as Alexa+ upgrades Amazon’s smart home - Generative AI models and smart home ecosystems are on an inevitable collision course... Read more
Scientists Sound Alarm on AI-Generated Biological Viruses Amid Unregulated Industry - “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not,” a pair of researchers... Read more
AI could become one of climate’s biggest energy problems and one of its most powerful solutions at the same time.
A Springer book, Generative AI for a Net Zero Economy, shows how AI is moving far beyond chatbots into carbon tracking, renewable energy optimization, smarter supply chains, climate forecasting and sustainable business models.
The impact can be substantial: the research highlights examples such as Google DeepMind reducing data center cooling costs by 40%, while AI can also optimize grids, logistics and industrial processes.
But there is a catch: training and running increasingly powerful AI systems consumes enormous amounts of energy, meaning AI can undermine the sustainability gains it is supposed to create.
The real winners will therefore be companies that combine AI with clean energy, measurable sustainability KPIs, strong governance and genuinely redesigned operations instead of simply adding another AI tool.
TL;DR: AI is not automatically green, but deployed correctly it could turn sustainability from a compliance obligation into a serious competitive advantage.
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