6 months of heavy Claude Code use: 4 prompt patterns that survived my notebook cleanup

I've been using Claude Code as a daily driver for about six months - not as a novelty, but as the thing I reach for when I'd otherwise grep, refactor, or write a migration script by hand. Over that time I rewrote my prompts four or five times. The version I use now barely resembles what I started with. Here's what changed. 1. Generic prompts produce generic output The first month, almost every prompt I wrote looked like "refactor this function" or "find bugs in this file". The results were what you'd expect: plausible, hedged, sometimes useful, rarely something I'd commit.