Show, don't describe

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Show, don't describe

A screenshot of a broken UI beats four paragraphs of describing it. Drag the image into the terminal — Claude will see what you see.

both

When the problem is visual — a misaligned button, a chart that’s not rendering, a layout that breaks on mobile — describing it in words wastes everyone’s time. Show Claude the screenshot.

macOS: ⌃⇧⌘4 puts the screenshot on the clipboard. Then Ctrl + V (not ⌘V!) pastes it into Claude Code. Yes, Ctrl, not Command — this trips people up the first time.

Windows / WSL: save the screenshot to a file first, then drag-and-drop it into the terminal window.

Same applies to error messages: paste the actual stack trace, not “I got an error”. Same applies to console output: paste it, don’t paraphrase. The fewer lossy human-translation hops, the better.

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"think harder" and /effort — turn up the reasoning when it matters

Drop "think harder" or "ultrathink" into a prompt and Claude reasons longer before answering. Use `/effort max` for hard debugging, architecture decisions, or anything where speed matters less than getting it right.

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