AI Guides › Claude Mastery
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
"Make it better" feels like a reasonable thing to type after a first draft lands and isn't quite right. It isn't lazy, exactly — you genuinely don't love the draft. But it hands over a judgement call with no criteria attached, and what comes back is a guess at what you meant, dressed up as an improvement.
The rule: "better" is not a direction, it's an admission that you haven't decided what's wrong yet — and the fix is to name the dimension, not repeat the instruction.
Before asking for a revision, identify which of these the draft is actually failing on. Usually it's one, occasionally two — rarely all of them at once.
| Dimension | What "better" actually means here |
|---|---|
| Accuracy | Something stated is wrong or unsupported |
| Tone | Right content, wrong register (too formal, too breezy) |
| Length | Right content, wrong amount of it |
| Structure | The information's there but badly ordered |
| Specificity | Too generic — needs your actual details, not placeholders |
| Persuasiveness | Technically fine, doesn't make the case |
Then ask for the dimension, not the vibe: "cut this by a third and keep the three examples," not "make it punchier." "The tone's too formal for a team Slack message," not "make it better." If you're not sure which dimension is wrong, that's a legitimate thing to ask Claude directly — "what do you think is weakest about this draft, structure or specificity?" — before asking for a fix, so the next revision targets something real instead of guessing at the same thing "better" would have guessed at.
Skip diagnosing every minor draft this thoroughly — for something disposable and low-stakes, "shorter" or "more casual" said plainly is enough; you don't need the whole table. And skip stacking vague instructions across several rounds ("better," then "even better") hoping the tenth pass converges on what you wanted. It rarely does — naming the dimension once beats vague iteration several times over.