Claude

What Claude does

Claude is Anthropic's assistant, used through a web application, desktop and mobile apps, and an API. It handles long documents well, keeps track of detail across extended conversations, and is widely preferred for writing, editing and analysis where nuance matters more than speed. Projects hold files and instructions for recurring work, artefacts render code and documents in a side panel you can iterate on, and connectors let it read from external systems through the Model Context Protocol. Its coding ability underpins a separate developer product. It suits writers, analysts, researchers and developers who want an assistant that engages with the substance of a question rather than producing a confident summary. The limitations are capacity and breadth: usage limits on paid plans can interrupt long sessions, and it offers fewer built-in consumer features, such as image generation, than the broadest general assistants.

How to use it

Sign up at claude.ai with an email or Google account; the free tier is usable for everyday questions and paid plans raise limits substantially. For recurring work, create a project, upload reference files and write instructions describing your role, standards and the output format you want, since that removes most repeated prompting. Long documents can be attached directly rather than pasted, and asking for quotes with their locations gives you something checkable. When generating code or a document, the artefact panel keeps the result separate from the conversation so you can iterate without losing it. Two things to plan around. Usage limits reset on a rolling window, so a heavy afternoon can pause you until later; starting a fresh conversation for each new task uses less capacity than one enormous thread. And connectors need explicit setup and permission for each service, which is deliberate but means integrations are not available by default.

Best for

• editing and writing
• long document analysis
• careful reasoning
• coding help
• research synthesis

Strengths and limitations