How to Give Claude Context (and Why It Still Matters)

Even now that Claude remembers you between conversations, it still starts most chats mostly blank about the specific thing in front of you. The memory holds who you are and how you like to work. It does not automatically hold the contract you are about to paste, the numbers from this quarter, or the three constraints that make this particular decision hard. Those you still have to hand it.

That distinction, between what Claude carries with it and what you have to give it fresh, is one of the most useful things to understand as a beginner. Get it wrong and you will keep hitting a wall no amount of clever prompting gets you past.

This is the ninth post in a beginner's series on Claude. The first one mapped out the whole tool. This one is about context, the single thing that most often separates a useless answer from a genuinely good one.

Memory Is the Notebook, Context Is the Desk

Think of two different things. Memory is the long-term notebook Claude keeps about you, the preferences and background it carries from one day to the next. Context is the desk it is working on right now, in this conversation, with whatever you have put on it. They are not the same, and confusing them is where a lot of frustration comes from.

Memory is light and lasting. Context is large and temporary. When you paste a document, that lands on the desk, not in the notebook. When the conversation ends, the desk is cleared. The notebook keeps a few notes about how it went, but the document itself is gone. So the rule of thumb is simple. Anything specific that this task depends on has to be on the desk, because the notebook was never going to hold it.

The Desk Is Big, but It Is Not Infinite

Claude can hold a genuinely enormous amount in a single conversation, roughly a short book's worth of text at once. That is a lot of desk. But it is not infinite and, more importantly, it is not memory. Two things follow from that.

The first is that if you pile too much onto the desk, the important part can get lost in the middle. When a conversation runs very long or you dump in fifty pages at once, the one line that actually mattered, buried on page forty, gets less of Claude's attention than the start and the end. It is the same way a person skims a huge document and remembers the opening and the closing better than the middle. More context is not always better. Relevant context is better.

The second is that when the desk fills up, older parts start to fade from view. In a marathon conversation, something you said near the top may no longer be shaping the answers near the bottom. If a detail from earlier really matters, it is often worth restating it rather than assuming it is still in play.

The Wall You Cannot Prompt Your Way Past

There is a moment every user hits. You have written a clear request, you have told Claude who it is for and what format you want, and the answer is still flat. You reach for better wording, and it does not help. That is almost never a prompting problem. It is a context problem.

The answer is flat because Claude is missing something it needs and no phrasing can invent it. It does not have the actual numbers, so it hedges. It has not seen the document, so it guesses at what is in it. It does not know the constraint that rules out the obvious answer, so it gives you the obvious answer. When you feel yourself rewording the same request for the third time, stop rewording. Ask instead what does it not know that a competent person would need to know here, and then put that on the desk.

How to Give Context Well

Paste the real thing, not a description of it. The actual email, the actual spreadsheet, the actual paragraph you are stuck on. A summary of the document is you doing the hard part for it and losing detail in the process.

Be specific about what matters in what you paste. Dropping in a forty page report and asking what do you think wastes most of it. Dropping in the same report and asking which of these three options does section four support gets you something useful.

Put the context you use over and over into a Project, so you are not re-pasting your brand voice or your product facts every single time. That is exactly what Projects are for, and it is the difference between briefing Claude from scratch daily and working with something that already has your background on the desk.

When to Start Fresh and When to Stay

A cluttered desk is a real cost, so knowing when to clear it helps. Start a fresh conversation when you switch to a genuinely different topic, or when a long thread has wandered and is now carrying a lot of irrelevant history that is muddying the answers. Stay in the same conversation when you are building on the same task, refining the same document, or working through steps that depend on each other. The signal that it is time for a fresh start is usually a feeling that Claude is being pulled by something earlier in the chat that no longer applies.

Where to Start This Week

The next time an answer disappoints you, do not rewrite the prompt. Ask yourself what you know that Claude cannot see, and paste that in. It is a small change in habit, from tuning your words to feeding the desk, and it fixes more bad answers than any prompting trick.

Context is the work, most of the time. If you want to build the habit properly, our free StudioMeyer Academy walks through it with examples. Next in the series, we go past the temporary desk entirely and into giving Claude a real, lasting memory of your work.