Stop explaining yourself to Claude

You're wasting tokens. Not a little -a lot. Here's a prompt I see constantly: "I have a React app and I'm using the useState hook. My component re-renders every time the parent renders even though the props haven't changed. Why is this happening?" Claude doesn't need any of that setup. It already knows React. It already knows what useState is. The only thing it needed was: "Component re-renders on parent render. Props unchanged. Why." Same answer. 64% fewer tokens. The delta principle Most prompts are written for humans. We explain context, name the framework, describe how things work before asking the question. That's how we communicate with each other. But Claude already knows the context. The only thing it needs is the delta — the new information, the specific problem, the unknown. Everything else is noise. What you can safely strip Claude already knows these — stop re-explaining them: Framework names used as context ("I have a React app",