Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, said in a post on X that there is "no secret to prompting" and that users no longer need long, heavily scaffolded instructions to drive modern models. In the Sonnet 3.5 era prompts mattered a lot, he said, but what matters now is telling the model three things: what you want it to do, how much effort to spend, and how it should verify it did the right thing. As an example, he shared a casual prompt asking Claude to build a piece based on a podcast episode, telling it to "spend more tokens" so the visuals would beat New Yorker or New York Times data visualization, and adding "maybe some watercolor." Responding to questions about whether that was too vague, Cherny said the latest Opus 5.5 model has excellent aesthetic taste and can judge for itself; he showed a beige-and-orange watercolor-style result.