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HuggingFace smolagents framework in action

Effortlessly run terminal commands, enhance projects with AI, collaborate with your team, and access features quickly, all through a sleek, modern interface designed for efficiency.

This guide outlines essential techniques for effectively prompting Claude 4 models (Opus 4 and Sonnet 4), which have been trained for more precise instruction following than previous generations. The key insight is that Claude 4 models respond well to clear, explicit instructions and require more specific guidance to achieve optimal results. Rather than expecting implicit 'above and beyond' behavior, users should provide explicit context about their goals, use positive instructions instead of negative ones, and carefully craft examples that align with desired outcomes. For specific applications, the guide recommends leveraging Claude 4's enhanced thinking capabilities for complex reasoning tasks, optimizing parallel tool calling for better performance, and being explicit about desired features in code generation. When migrating from earlier models like Sonnet 3.7, users should frame instructions with quality modifiers and request specific behaviors directly rather than assuming Claude will infer them. The overarching theme is that Claude 4's precision requires more deliberate prompting to unlock its full potential, but rewards this effort with more targeted and reliable responses.