This site is a combination learning resource and ongoing experiment with using Anthropic’s Claude LLM as a deeply connected daily work assistant. It tests the limits of Claude’s capabilities, documents shortcomings and outright failures, but it also provides best practice guidance and tips & tricks to get the most out of using Claude.
You’ll notice that most content on this site contains italicized introductions prior to the main post content. That’s because I’m using Claude specifically to draft post and page content, and adding my own editorial around it. If you see an italicized paragraph, it was typed out with my own hands, but all other content should be assumed to have been drafted by Claude during a chat session.
Content Creation
TheClaudefather documents real interactions between a human practitioner and Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. Every post on this site begins as an actual working session—designing templates, building features, solving problems, making mistakes.
Claude serves a dual role here. It’s the AI being discussed (the subject of the teaching), and it’s also the primary content generator (drafting posts from documented sessions, creating featured images, building the site infrastructure). This isn’t a site about Claude written by someone else—it’s a site with Claude, showing the collaboration in action.
Jinx is the human half of the equation: the one asking the questions, giving the prompts, catching the errors, and deciding what’s worth publishing. Every session is guided by human intent, and every post goes through human review before it goes live. The mistakes documented here are real mistakes; the corrections are real corrections.
The goal isn’t to present polished, idealized workflows. It’s to show what actually happens when you work with Claude—including the parts where things go sideways.
Issue Types
When sessions encounter problems, they’re categorized by issue type. These categories help identify patterns and make it easier to find posts about specific failure modes.
Misinterpretation
Claude understood the request differently than intended. This often stems from ambiguous phrasing in the prompt—words that have multiple valid interpretations. The fix usually involves clarifying what was actually meant and providing more specific guidance.
Drift
Claude gradually moved away from the original intent over the course of a conversation. This can happen when context accumulates or when Claude makes reasonable-but-wrong assumptions about direction. Catching drift early prevents compounding errors.
Hallucination
Claude stated something confidently that turned out to be incorrect. This might be a fabricated fact, a non-existent feature, or a technical claim that doesn’t hold up. Hallucinations require verification and correction.
Spiral
Repeated attempts that don’t improve or actively make things worse. Spirals happen when the approach itself is flawed, and more iterations won’t fix it. The solution is usually to step back, reassess, and try a different direction entirely.
Regression
Something that was working correctly got broken by a later change. Regressions are particularly frustrating because they represent lost progress. They’re often caught by testing or by noticing that a previously-solved problem has reappeared.
Callout Types
Posts use four callout types to highlight different categories of teaching content. Each serves a specific purpose:
TRAP callouts warn about pitfalls, ambiguities, and common mistakes. When you see red, something went wrong that you can learn from—usually a prompt that was less clear than it seemed, or an assumption that didn’t hold.
TECHNIQUE callouts describe actionable approaches you can apply in your own sessions. These are the “here’s how to do it” moments—methods for structuring prompts, giving corrections, or working through problems.
BOUNDARY callouts explain Claude’s capabilities, defaults, and limitations. These set realistic expectations about what Claude can and can’t do, how it behaves by default, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie.
INSIGHT callouts crystallize key conceptual takeaways. These are the principles worth remembering—the mental models and reframes that apply beyond the specific session being discussed.
Get in Touch
Have questions about something you read here? Want to suggest a topic or share your own Claude experience? Found an error that needs correcting?
Reach out at hello@theclaudefather.com.