AImaxxing 101: the full playbook.

1. Use Claude as your daily driver, not ChatGPT

ChatGPT is fine for quick lookups but hallucinates and over-flatters. Claude is built around honesty and depth, which is why almost all real work runs through it.

The stack right now:

• Claude (Opus 4.7) writing, thinking, building, research
• Perplexity anything where you need cited sources fast
• ChatGPT image generation and quick throwaway questions

Rule of thumb: if the answer matters, use Claude. If you need fresh data with sources, use Perplexity. If you just need an image, ChatGPT or Higgsfield.

2. Skills beat re-prompting forever

If you find yourself typing the same instructions every day ("write in my voice", "format like this", "always do X first"), you're losing hours a week. Skills fix this.

A Skill is a folder of instructions you build once that Claude loads automatically when the task fits. Newsletter, sales emails, IG captions, hook generation, all of it.

How to build your first one (5 minutes)

The Skill Creator is pre-installed in Claude Desktop and Cowork. It interviews you, writes the skill, and even auto-tests trigger rates. Zero coding. Skills work in Claude.ai, Claude Code, and the API with the same SKILL.md format, so you build once and run everywhere.

3. Ask 5 times, pick the best (parallel sampling)

One prompt is one shot at the answer. Five parallel prompts are five candidates you can pick from or remix. Where this hits hardest:

• Hooks for reels — run the same brief 5x, pick the strongest.
• Email subject lines.
• Headlines for landing pages.
• Creative concepts.

Pro move: after generating the 5, paste them all back into a fresh chat and ask Claude to rank them against criteria you define — curiosity gap, specificity, originality. The judge step is where most people leave value on the table.

4. Connect your tools with MCP (the big 2026 unlock)

MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets your AI actually do work in your apps. No more copy-paste between ChatGPT and Gmail and Notion. Connectors worth running inside Claude:

• Gmail drafts replies, searches threads, labels
• Google Calendar creates and moves events
• Notion reads and writes pages
• Google Drive pulls files into context
• Fireflies pulls meeting transcripts directly
• Stripe revenue checks
• Figma + Canva design generation

Set it up under Claude Settings → Connectors, enable the ones you use, then just say "draft a reply to the last email from [name]" and it happens. Going from "AI that talks" to "AI that does" is the whole game in 2026.

5. Tell it to be brief (and other format controls)

Default AI output is bloated because RLHF rewards verbose answers. You have to override it. Format commands that work:

• "Be brief" / "One paragraph only"
• "Skip the intro and conclusion, just the answer"
• "Give me bullets, no prose"
• "Answer like you're texting a friend"
• "Max 3 sentences"

For longer work, flip it the other way: "Don't summarize. Give me the full version." Either way, you're in control of length. Stop accepting the default.

6. Write custom instructions (where personalization lives)

Custom instructions are the closest thing to "training" Claude on you without fine-tuning. A good set covers:

• Who you are and what you do.
• Your communication style (no em dashes, no corporate AI voice, no hedging).
• What you're working on right now.
• What you want it to push back on.
• What it should never do (no "I'd be happy to", no "great question").

The shortcut: dump a few YouTube transcripts, voice notes, or sales-call transcripts into a project. Claude picks up your voice from unfiltered speech better than from polished writing. Ramble for 5 minutes into Wisprflow or any transcription tool, paste it in, done.

Set this once in Claude Settings → Preferences. Every conversation inherits it.

7. Give context. Give examples. Always.

The number-one reason AI output is generic is that the prompt is generic. Two fixes that compound:

Add context. Tell it the situation, the audience, what's been tried, what you're avoiding. "Write me a cold email" is bad. "Write me a cold email to a $5M-revenue AU SaaS founder who already tried HubSpot and bounced off the pricing, opening with the specific objection they had" is good.

Add examples. Show 2–3 examples of what good looks like, and one example of what you don't want. Contrastive examples (good + bad) beat good-only examples in every test, especially on tone. The format: "Here's what I want it to sound like: [example]. Here's what I don't want: [example]. Now do [task]."

Bonus: the tools actually worth paying for

Not a sponsored list. Just what's on the card in 2026.

Core AI

• Claude Max daily driver
• Perplexity Pro research with citations
• Higgsfield image and video generation for content

Workflow

• Claude Code automations and literally everything else
• Obsidian second brain
• Fireflies meeting transcripts piped into Claude

Content

• Wisprflow voice-to-text for fast brain dumps into prompts
• CapCut editing
• Canva quick graphics

For builders

• Claude Code agentic coding in the terminal
• VS Code IDE
• Supabase + Railway backend infra for AI apps

The meta-tip

The people getting the most out of AI right now aren't the ones with the best prompts. They're the ones who built systems: custom instructions set once, skills for repeat tasks, MCP connections so AI can act, and the habit of asking 5 times instead of 1. The compounding is real. A skill you build today saves you 30 minutes every week forever.

Original guide by Artem Novitckii. Follow his YouTube for weekly AI breakdowns, catch him on Instagram, join the Skool community, and browse his resource library.