Setting Up Claude

Go to claude.ai and sign up. Claude's free tier gives you access to Claude 4 Sonnet with daily usage limits — generous enough for learning.

Claude's interface is clean and minimal. Like ChatGPT, it's a simple chat interface, but with some unique features.

Projects — Organize conversations by topic. Add files, instructions, and context that persist across all chats within a project. This is powerful for ongoing work.

Artifacts — When Claude generates code, documents, or structured content, it appears in a side panel you can edit, copy, and iterate on.

200K Context Window — Claude can process roughly 150,000 words in a single conversation. Upload entire books or codebases.

XML Tag Support — Claude responds exceptionally well to prompts structured with XML tags like <instructions>, <context>, <examples>. We'll cover this in depth later.

Claude tends to excel at:
- Long document analysis — Upload PDFs, contracts, research papers
- Writing quality — More natural, less "AI-sounding" prose
- Following complex instructions — Particularly with XML-structured prompts
- Code review and explanation — Thorough, well-explained analysis
- Nuanced topics — Tends to handle ambiguity and edge cases thoughtfully

ChatGPT tends to excel at:
- General knowledge — Broader training data
- Image generation — Built-in DALL-E
- Plugins and integrations — Larger ecosystem
- Quick tasks — Slightly faster for simple requests