What Claude Taught Me About Using Claude

I've had 104 conversations with Claude over 10 months. When I looked back at the first one versus the most recent, the gulf in my old and new interaction styles is obvious. Not because I learned amazing new prompting tricks — more that I learned to think more clearly about what I actually needed before I opened my mouth (metaphorically - moved my fingers, whatever). The irony of getting better at talking to - or working with - AI is that it has very little to do with AI. The Exercise I ran a retro on my own Claude usage history. Pulled conversations from across the full timeline, scored them on things like context richness, specificity of the ask, how well I course-corrected when the output wasn't right. I essentially used Claude to performance review my usage of Claude. How delightfully meta eh. What emerged was a clear three-phase progression. Not in Claude's capabilities — those improved too, but that's not for this post. The progression was in mine. In how clearly I was thinking ab