The Complete Claude Anthropic Tutorial

Key Takeaways

So, you've heard about Chat GPT making people rich and Gemini revolutionizing search, but here's one AI that's quietly becoming the secret weapon of top developers, researchers, and business [music] owners. And most people have no idea it even exists. Meet Anthropic's Claude. [music] It's about to change how you work with AI. I've done a deep dive into all of Claude's features and I'm going to show you how Claude can integrate with your Google Workspace, code whole apps, and even interactive dashboards. It can summarize your data into visual masterpieces, prioritize your schedule, and a lot [music] more. I'm not just going to show you what Claude can do, but I'm going to show you the best settings, how to improve your prompts, and the best tools to use to save you time and money, and potentially, maybe take over [music] the world. So, first off, what is Claude? Claude is an AI assistant or a large language model, similar to Chat GPT. It's designed to help you through reasoning, writing, coding, and working with large documents. It is made by a company called Anthropic and is trained on large amounts of data, including the personal context that you choose [music] to give it. So, what makes it different compared to other AI models? Claude tends to shine in conversation style, coding, and ethical reasoning. Chat GPT is probably the strongest at creative writing and broad general knowledge. Gemini's strength lies in its multimodal abilities and of course Google integration. You can access Claude through their website, their mobile app, their desktop app, or through APIs. Now, here are the settings that you will need to get out of Claude. You can leave custom instructions blank because, honestly, it's more effective to just be clear in your prompts. Next, turn on artifacts for a separate window that's going to show Claude's complex thinking and outputs live. This way you can kind of track the process it's going through. Switch on the analysis tool for data, code, and visuals. You can connect Google Drive so that Claude can scan through your documents. One thing to note is that Claude works on a token-based system. Each prompt and response counts as a certain amount of tokens. This means you have a limit to how many messages you can send. Think of Claude's tokens like arcade tokens. You only get so many per game, so you really have to make sure your moves count. Don't worry though, I will train you in the ways. It's 9:00 a.m. You're drowning in emails, your to-do list look like a novel, and you're frantically trying to remember what was actually urgent for the day. Well, what if I told you that Claude can look at all that chaos, your emails, your Asana boards, your Google Drive mess, and in seconds find the three things that actually matter for you to do today? It's kind of like having a personal assistant that actually has their life together. One cool example is that you could take a Shopify store setup checklist, feed it to Claude, and get it to create the full development roadmap for you to follow in a way that works with your brain. I'm going to show you how to make that information visual or even interactive in just a second. Here is something that blew my mind. Claude can now live directly in your browser and actually interact with web pages. Like we're talking about an AI that can click buttons, fill out forms, and understand exactly what you're looking at without having to explain it. It's basically like having a smart friend looking over your shoulder, except for they're very helpful and can do everything for you. Okay, let's be honest. We've all been there. You have a big important meeting tomorrow and you've been putting off the prep work for a lot longer than you'd like to admit. This is where Claude becomes your best friend. It will take all your scattered notes, documents, web research, basically everything you probably should have organized weeks ago, and create meeting notes so good that your boss is going to be proud. Now, if you're a visual thinker like me, you're going to love this next part. I can throw my information into Claude and just say, "Make me an infographic." And watch while it literally starts generating code in the side panel. That's the artifact tool at work. And in seconds, my boring notes are now a visual that I can actually understand and play around with. You know that feeling when you have 20 tabs open, five half-finished notes, and no idea which version of your project is the latest? Well, the project tool fixes that. You can have separate chats and documents all connected in one beautiful place. You can also give your project specific instructions or documents to work off of, meaning you can create as many different things as you want, but they all have the same vibe and important information in them. Back when I was in school, I'd crack open these giant 300-page textbooks with those tiny print, and honestly zero chance of me making it past like page 20. But now I look at Claude and I'm like, "Where was this when I needed it? Where were you?" Because if you're working with textbooks right now, you can upload the whole textbook and instead of reading through paragraphs and paragraphs, turn it into an interactive dashboard that you can learn from. Lastly, on this section, you can choose the screenshot tool to grab a screenshot from another tab or window. It's super useful to get quick answers on anything that you're currently working on. Okay, so I keep hearing that Claude is this amazing writer. But how good can AI writing actually be? At this point, it's pretty easy to spot AI writing from a mile away. So, let's put Claude to the test. I'm going to ask it something a little bit challenging. I want it to make a Hollywood-style script about what it's like being a young adult in today's society. Let's see what it wrote me. Okay, so it did write a pretty nice script. I haven't got a chance to read all the way through it, but you can initially see that the format is pretty nice, very close to a Hollywood-style script, not quite exact. It is missing a few details, so I would say it did a good job, but ultimately with Claude, you're likely going to have to re-prompt it a few times to get exactly what you want. Now, similar to how you would hire a writer based on their specific genre and tone of voice, you now have the option to use preset writing styles. However, to be honest, clear prompting often works better than using these styles. If you're a good director, Claude will do good work. I'm going to give Claude information about a Shopify product and ask it to draft a blog post. Again, you can see that artifact is showing the output on the side of the screen. You can also copy information or download a text file that it has created. If you add a follow-up prompt, you can see it making real-time edits in the artifact window. Claude does choose when it uses this feature, so if your prompt is too simple, it may just give you the answer in the chat box. When I was younger, dealing with tough math problems was a nightmare and I'd stare at the answer for hours and just not understand how they got to it. But with Claude, you just flip on extended thinking and it will break down math problems, fix your coding bugs, and explain its processes to you. Again, Claude, where were you? Where were you when I needed you most? >> [music] >> But I mean, at least it's here for me now, so that's helpful. Claude is a great partner when it comes to dealing with large amounts of data. So, if you're a busy business owner, you can upload any messy data that you need to organize and it will clean it up, turn it into charts, interactive displays, [music] or whatever your heart desires. To connect your Shopify to Claude, you can use tools like make.com that can pull in sales [music] data, customer patterns, and inventory trends for Claude to break down. The best part is that if something goes wrong, Claude can often troubleshoot and fix the errors along the way. If you're not on Shopify yet, but are thinking of starting an online business, I have linked a free trial for you right here and in the description down below. Shopify integrates with all of the biggest AI tools, which is an amazing help when you're trying to build and run a new business. I honestly think vibe coding is one of the biggest opportunities of our time. Stuff that used to take a whole development team weeks to build, you can now whip up in minutes for basically no cost. And the best part is that you don't need any coding experience. That's why they call it vibe [music] coding. It's exactly what it sounds like. Claude does the heavy lifting and you just vibe, tell it what to do, and what you want it to change. So, what kind of things can Claude code for you? Let's say you're hosting a pop-up event and suddenly you realize you need a quick order system so customers can actually buy your products. Normally, that would mean hiring a developer or trying to build on a drag-and-drop site yourself. With Claude, you can literally build it on the spot. [music] For example, you could give it a prompt like, "Create a simple flow for placing luxury hat orders, plus an admin screen to view them. Store the data in local storage [music] and follow these mock-ups exactly using the same images and fonts." And [music] just like that, Claude starts building your prototype. Here is what it created for me. If you've ever had a crazy game idea as a kid or even as an adult and wish you could bring it to life, Claude can build out apps and games for you. So, you could build a game to play for fun or you could make an app that other people can pay you for and subscribe to. Okay, so I got Claude to make a budget master simulation where you can adjust business expenses, marketing spend, or hiring costs with sliders, and the simulation shows projected profit and loss over time. If you notice any sort of error in the code while building, just ask Claude to fix it and it will go ahead and troubleshoot the problem. Here are some important tips straight from the Anthropic team themselves that's going to make your prompts stand out and actually get good results. You are getting in on the secrets here. One of these prompting tricks in particular made Claude's response 10 times better for me. So, prompt engineering is about communicating what you want and how you want it done. It's like directing a really talented assistant who happens to work at lightning speed and does a million things. Be the director and you will get good results. Do not leave it up to Claude to decide. First, it's super important to be specific and clear. Claude is not a mind reader. So, for example, saying "Help me write something." it's very broad. [music] But if you say, "I'm a teacher preparing a fifth-grade science lesson on photosynthesis." >> [music] >> that would be a lot better. Next, define Claude's role. For example, act as a fitness coach and design a four-week beginner workout plan that requires no equipment and fits into 30 minutes [music] a day. It now knows that it is a fitness trainer who makes four-week plans. Next, you need to set clear expectations. you want Claude to do and how do you want Claude to do it? For example, instead of just saying, "Write a summary of this information." you would say, "Write me a 300-word summary in bullet points that highlights the five most important takeaways." It has a very clear format on how you want it. If you don't feel confident about your prompt quite yet, just ask Claude for help because who knows Claude better than Claude itself? It's going to help you put together a prompt that will work. You could just say something like, "I'm not sure how to phrase my prompt. Can you help me write a better one?" And it will help [music] you. And of course, work with Claude until you get exactly what you want. For example, you could say, "That's good, but can you make it more conversational?" Or, "Can you change the format so that everything is symmetrical?" It's highly likely that it won't be 100% correct off the bat. But the better the prompting, the quicker you're going to get the exact answer and output that you want. Now, here's where things get really fun. This is level two prompting. These new prompting techniques will be very useful in your tool belt. So, please use them. First is few-shot prompting, basically giving examples. If you give Claude examples and tell it to base the output on them, it will have a much cleaner result. Even better if you tell it what you specifically like about the examples that you're giving it. You can break down any complex tasks step-by-step so that it knows what to do first and what to do last. Now, this one is a total game-changer. You can use something called chain-of-thought prompting and get Claude to triple-check its answers, explain why [music] it gave you that answer, and only tell you things if it's 100% positive that it knows it is correct. Most importantly, give Claude time to think. For example, you can say things like, "Think through this problem carefully before answering." Here's the difference between a prompt where we ask it to think carefully and one where we don't. You can see how much longer it takes the AI to answer and how it's much more well thought out than when you don't get it to triple-check its responses. You can also structure your prompts with tags. Sometimes you want the answer from AI in a very specific format. [music] That's where structured outputs like JSON or XML come in. They're basically ways of telling Claude, "Put your answer inside this template." I know those sound like scary programmer words, but they're actually just fancy ways of [music] getting Claude to organize its answers exactly how you want them. Think of it like asking somebody to put their response in a specific way [music] instead of just rambling. JSON is basically just clean, organized lists, >> [music] >> and XML uses these bracket thingies that you see in code. Way less intimidating than they sound, trust me. Okay, so you now know how Claude normally works. You ask it something, it gives you an answer, and done deal. AI agents are like Claude on steroids. Instead of just responding once and calling it a day, an agent actually goes to work for you. It will reason through problems, use different tools, connect to your Shopify store or calendar, and keep working until the job is actually finished. It's the difference between asking a friend for advice versus hiring someone to actually handle the whole project for you. An AI agent can actually log into systems, check your calendar, pull data from Shopify, test code, and keep iterating until everything works perfectly. It's like having a really smart intern who never sleeps, never complains, and can access all of your business tools at once. While AI agents can do a lot of things, they are still developing for the everyday consumer. For example, it's still pretty risky to make things like booking agents because you don't want the AI agent to accidentally book a $2,000 flight. We will be seeing a lot of improvement in this space in the future, but there are limitations. Here is a tip. If you're going to build out an AI agent, start with something simple. [music] I do have a full video on how to build AI agents that you can check out right here. Okay, remember that meeting prep nightmare we talked about earlier? Well, with Google Drive integration, it becomes super easy. Just point Claude to your meeting agenda in Google Docs, throw in any relevant files from your drive, and boom, you have a briefing doc ready. You don't have to frantically search through folders 5 minutes before your meeting starts. This integration can be really helpful if you need Claude to access [music] things from your Google Drive on a short notice. So, is Claude right for you? If you spend a lot of time working with documents, data, or writing, and you need something that can dig deep, reason things through, and even build out apps or platforms, Claude is going to make your life a lot easier. Especially if you're already using Google Workspace. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and let us know in the comments if you plan on using Claude for your workflow. And as always, make sure to subscribe to Learn With Shopify if you haven't already, and hit the bell for notifications so you don't miss out on our weekly videos on all things business. I'm Charisma, and I will see you guys on the next one.