prompt

Craft reference for any text another LLM will read - a one-turn instruction to a subagent, a message that opens a long run, a prompt written into a file or code, a system prompt, a CLAUDE.md, a skill body, a hook. Use BEFORE writing any of them. Every text enters the reader's context at distance zero; what differs is the hold - how many turns after entry it must still be steering the reader. The hold picks the craft, not the kind of file and not the text's length. A one-turn hold wants terse, complete, said-once. A long hold keeps the body terse and hardens only the lines nothing will re-ask - boundaries, the stop condition, constraints that bite late. A whole-session hold against situations the writer cannot see buys redundancy, imagery, and rehearsed temptations. Reading the hold off the text's length or its filename is the known failure.