Anthropic Engineer Shares ELI5 Prompting Method
Thariq Shihipar describes using slash commands to generate simple visual explanations.
Thariq Shihipar, an engineer on Anthropic's Claude Code team, posted that colleagues use an ELI5 prompting technique. The command /eli5 followed by a topic directs the model to explain for someone with no prior knowledge, outputting an HTML artifact with large images and minimal text. His post included a video demonstration. Hiten Shah amplified the message on X. Replies on X split between praise for the visual approach and criticism that the need for such prompts highlights overly verbose model output.
a skill people at Anthropic have been using a lot recently: ELI5 /eli5 <what you want explained> "explain like I'm someone who knows nothing about this topic, using a HTML artifact with big pictures and few words"
Anthropic Engineer Shares ELI5 Prompting Method
Thariq Shihipar describes using slash commands to generate simple visual explanations.
Thariq Shihipar, an engineer on Anthropic's Claude Code team, posted that colleagues use an ELI5 prompting technique. The command /eli5 followed by a topic directs the model to explain for someone with no prior knowledge, outputting an HTML artifact with large images and minimal text. His post included a video demonstration. Hiten Shah amplified the message on X. Replies on X split between praise for the visual approach and criticism that the need for such prompts highlights overly verbose model output.
Reactions from ranked influencers
2 postsI like to use this for explainers and diving into a problem, e.g. /eli5 how does this module work /eli5 why did we make this tradeoff /eli5 what caused this incident
a skill people at Anthropic have been using a lot recently: ELI5 /eli5 <what you want explained> "explain like I'm someone who knows nothing about this topic, using a HTML artifact with big pictures and few words"