How Do You Use Claude AI?

Most guides to Claude start by explaining what a large language model is. That is rarely what people want. The question behind "how do you use Claude AI" is usually much more practical: where do I type, which model should I pick, why does it forget what I told it yesterday, and what is it actually better at than the thing I was using before.

This is that walkthrough. It covers the surfaces, the one setting that changes the answers most, the feature that separates casual use from real use, and the places where Claude is the wrong tool.

What is the short answer?

Go to claude.ai, sign in, and type into the box. That is genuinely the whole of getting started, and the free tier is enough to find out whether the tool suits your work.

The three things that take you from dabbling to useful are: choosing the right model for the job rather than leaving it on the default, putting repeated work inside a Project so you stop re-explaining your context, and giving Claude the actual source material instead of describing it.

None of those three is a trick, and none of them requires a paid plan to try. They are the difference between an assistant that gives you plausible paragraphs and one that gives you work you can send.

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Where do you use it?

Claude is the same assistant on every surface. Which one you pick is about where your work already lives.

The web app

claude.ai in a browser is the main interface and the one with everything in it. Chats, Projects, file uploads, web search and the side panel where Claude builds things are all here. If you only ever use one surface, use this one.

The desktop and mobile apps

The desktop app is the web app in its own window, which matters more than it sounds — it stays out of your browser tab chaos and it is the surface that connects to tools on your own machine. The mobile app is for capture and quick questions: photograph a whiteboard, dictate a thought, ask something while away from a desk. Both are included on the free plan.

Claude Code

A separate thing that shares the name. Claude Code is a command-line tool for software work, it runs in your terminal and in your editor, and it is on paid plans rather than the free tier. If you are not writing code, you can ignore it entirely.

Where it meets your other tools

On paid plans Claude also reaches into places you already work — a browser extension, a Microsoft 365 connection, and connectors to outside services. These are convenience rather than capability: the same model, handed material it can fetch itself instead of material you paste. Worth turning on once you have decided the tool is useful, not before.

How do you actually use it, step by step?

1. Sign in at claude.ai. The free plan needs no payment details.
2. Pick a model. There is a picker near the message box, and on the free plan you get the mid-tier and fast models while the most capable one sits behind a paid plan. Use the fast model for quick lookups and reformatting, and the capable one for anything you would have given to a competent colleague.
3. Type your request, but give it the material. Paste the document, upload the spreadsheet, drop in the actual page. Claude cannot see your screen, your files or your site unless you hand them over.
4. Say what the output should be. "Rewrite this as six bullets for a client email" beats "improve this" by a wide margin, every time.
5. Read the first answer as a draft and push back on it. The second and third turns of a conversation are where almost all of the value is, and treating the first response as final is the most common way people conclude the tool is mediocre.
6. When Claude builds something substantial — a document, a table, a working page — it appears in a panel beside the chat rather than in the message. You can edit it there and ask for revisions against it.
7. When the same kind of task comes back a second time, move it into a Project.

Writing a request that works

The pattern that holds up is: context, task, format, constraints. Who this is for and what it has to do, what you want done, what shape the output should take, and what it must avoid. Four sentences is usually plenty.

Two additions earn their keep. Say who the reader is, because "explain this" to a board and to a new hire are different tasks. And name what you do not want — no preamble, no bullet points, nothing invented — because negative constraints are followed more reliably than vague requests for quality.

The failure mode is not rudeness or wrong phrasing — it is vagueness. Claude will answer a vague question with a vague answer rather than asking you to be clearer, so the burden sits with you.

The corollary is that long requests are not worse than short ones. A paragraph of real context costs you nothing and removes a whole round of correction. The people who find the tool frustrating are almost always the people typing one line.

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What are Projects, and when should you use them?

A Project is a workspace that holds chats together with shared knowledge and standing instructions. Anything you upload to the project knowledge is available in every chat inside that project, and the project instructions apply to all of them.

This solves the single most annoying thing about using any assistant: context does not carry between separate chats. Claude does not remember what you said in yesterday's conversation unless that information lives somewhere persistent. A Project is that somewhere.

Projects are available on the free plan, with a cap of five, and without a cap on paid plans. Paid plans also handle larger knowledge bases by switching to a retrieval mode when the uploaded material approaches the context limit, which means a project can hold more than a single conversation could.

How a project changes a chat

Inside a project, every new chat starts already knowing the things you loaded. You stop opening with three paragraphs of background and open with the actual task instead, which is both faster and better — the background you wrote once, carefully, beats the background you retype from memory each time.

What belongs in project knowledge

Your style guide, your brand voice notes, the product descriptions, the list of things you never say, last quarter's report, the schema of the spreadsheet you keep asking about. The test is simple: if you have explained it twice, it belongs in the project rather than in a message.

What does not belong there is anything you would not want surfacing in an unrelated chat. Project knowledge is applied to every conversation in the project, so a half-finished draft or a one-off client file will quietly influence answers weeks later. Keep projects narrow and make a new one rather than letting one become a junk drawer.

One caveat worth knowing — the project description field is for you, not for Claude. Guidance has to go in the instructions field to have any effect.

The five-project cap on the free plan is less restrictive than it sounds, because the right number of projects is small. One per ongoing piece of work is plenty; one per task is a mess.

When is Claude the right tool?

It earns its place on work that is language-shaped and judgement-heavy: drafting and editing, summarising long documents, restructuring messy notes, explaining something unfamiliar at the level you ask for, writing and debugging code, reading a spreadsheet and telling you what moved.

For marketing and SEO specifically, the honest version is that it is strong on the parts that are writing problems — outlines, drafts, meta descriptions, rewriting a thin page into something worth reading, turning a keyword list into topic clusters that make sense. It is weak on the parts that are measurement problems, because it has no access to your analytics, your rankings or your crawl data unless you give it the export.

That division is a useful planning rule. Anything that starts with "read this and" is a good fit. Anything that starts with "check whether" needs a tool with access to the thing being checked, and the sensible pattern is to pull the data yourself and hand Claude the file.

It is the wrong tool when the answer has to be exact and verifiable from a source you can cite, when the task is really a database query, when the facts are hours old, or when you cannot check the output. That last one is the real rule: use it where you are competent enough to catch an error, not where you are not.

It is also not a search engine, and treating it as one is the fastest route to a bad experience. Asking for today's figures or this morning's news gets you either a web search or a confident guess, and the two are not always easy to tell apart unless you asked for the search explicitly.

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What are the limitations?

Usage limits, not a monthly allowance. Limits reset on a rolling window of a few hours rather than monthly, and paid plans add a weekly ceiling on top. Long sessions with big files hit the limit faster than many short questions, which surprises people who expect a simple message count.

It can be confidently wrong. Specific numbers, dates, prices, citations and quotations are where this bites. Anything load-bearing needs checking against a primary source.

Knowledge has a cutoff. The model's training has an end date, so recent events are either unknown or come from a web search in the moment. If currency matters, ask it to search rather than trusting recall.

No memory of other chats by default. Each conversation starts fresh unless the information is in a Project or the memory feature is doing the work. This is a design choice rather than a bug, but it catches everyone once.

It cannot see what you did not share. Not your screen, not your files, not your site, not your dashboard. Access is explicit.

Long conversations degrade. A chat that has run for hours carries its whole history, and quality drops as the useful context gets crowded out by old turns. When answers start drifting, the fix is almost always a fresh chat with a clean summary of where you got to, not more correction in the old one.

Model availability differs by plan. The most capable model is a paid feature, and the usage multipliers between tiers are substantial. The plan ladder runs Free, Pro, Max, then Team and Enterprise for organisations, with Pro at roughly twenty dollars a month as the usual anchor point — but the tiers and the inclusions have been restructured more than once, so check the current pricing page before you commit.

How does it compare to the alternatives?

ChatGPT. The broadest feature set and the biggest ecosystem. Claude is generally preferred for long-document work, careful writing and code; ChatGPT has the edge on breadth, image generation and sheer number of integrations. Most people who use both end up with Claude for drafting and analysis and ChatGPT for everything else.

Gemini. The natural choice if your work lives in Google Docs, Sheets and Gmail, because the integration is the point. Weaker on long-form writing quality in most side-by-side tests.

Perplexity. A different tool wearing a similar coat. Perplexity is built for sourced research with citations; Claude is built for working on material you bring it. For "what is the current state of X, with links", Perplexity wins. For "read these forty pages and tell me what is wrong with the argument", Claude wins.

Grok and DeepSeek. Both are capable and both are cheap, and both are chosen on price or on ecosystem rather than on output quality. If cost is the deciding factor they are worth a look; if the output is going in front of a client, test before you switch.

Microsoft Copilot. Where it beats everything is inside Office — it can see your actual Outlook, Teams and Excel content with permissions already in place. Outside those apps it is less compelling.

A local open model. Free after setup and completely private, at the cost of real capability and real effort. Worth it when the data genuinely cannot leave your machine, rarely worth it otherwise.

The comparison that actually matters is narrower than any feature grid. Run the same real task through two of them — your own document, your own brief, your own standards — and the difference shows up in about ten minutes. Published benchmarks will not tell you which one suits how you write.

Final Thoughts

Using Claude well is not about prompt tricks. It comes down to four habits: hand over the actual material rather than describing it, pick the capable model when the task deserves one, put anything you have explained twice into a Project, and treat the first answer as a draft you argue with. People who do those four things get a different tool than people who type one line and judge the result.

A fair first week looks like this: take three tasks you actually do, run each of them properly with the material attached, and keep the outputs. If two of the three came back usable after one round of pushback, the tool fits your work. If none did, the problem is usually the brief rather than the model, and it is worth one more attempt with real context before writing it off.

Start on the free plan, use it on real work for a week, and let your own usage tell you whether you need a paid tier. If you get to that point, our Claude AI pricing guide breaks down what each plan actually changes.

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