Free sample from Claude Unlocked

From Part One: The CRTF Framework

2.1 The CRTF Framework

CRTF stands for Context, Role, Task, Format. It is a simple checklist you run through before sending almost any non-trivial prompt. You don't need all four elements every time — asking Claude what year the Grand Canyon became a national park doesn't need a role or a format — but for anything you want a genuinely tailored, high-quality response to, running through all four will transform your results.

C — Context. What's the situation? What does Claude need to know that it has no way of guessing? This is everything covered in section 1.4: background, audience, constraints, source material.

R — Role. Who should Claude "be" while answering this? Assigning Claude a specific role or expertise changes the vocabulary, the priorities, and the depth of the response. "Answer as a general assistant" produces a generic answer. "Answer as an experienced elementary school teacher explaining this to a parent" produces something with a completely different, more useful shape. A role is not a gimmick — it's a fast, effective way of telling Claude which of its many "modes" to draw on.

T — Task. What, specifically, do you want to do? This sounds obvious, but vague tasks are the single most common prompting mistake. "Help me with my resume" is not a task. "Rewrite the bullet points under my most recent job to lead with results and numbers instead of just listing duties" is a task.

F — Format. How should the answer be structured and how long should it be? A list? A short paragraph? A table? A script with a specific word count for a 60-second video? Without this, Claude has to guess, and it will often guess longer and more formal than you wanted.

Here is the CRTF framework applied to a real, everyday example.

Before CRTF:

Help me write a review for the restaurant we went to last night.

After CRTF:

Context: We went to Bella Notte, an Italian restaurant downtown, last
night for my anniversary. The food was excellent — the branzino
especially — but the service was slow (we waited 20 minutes just to
order) and the restaurant was very loud, which made conversation hard.
I still want to leave a mostly positive review because the food really
was that good, but I want to be honest about the wait and the noise.
Role: Write this as a thoughtful, fair customer — not a professional
food critic and not an angry one-star reviewer.
Task: Write a Google review of this experience.
Format: 100-120 words, three short paragraphs (food, service/atmosphere,
overall recommendation), ending with a star rating out of 5 and a
one-line reason for that rating.

Notice that this prompt is longer to write than the first one. That is the entire trade — a slightly longer prompt in exchange for a dramatically better, closer-to-finished response, instead of a generic review you'd have to rewrite by hand anyway. As you get comfortable with CRTF, writing prompts this way takes under a minute and becomes automatic.

Other sections mentioned above are in the full guide.

From Part Three: Turn an Existing Prompt into a Skill

8.2 The Fast Path: Turn an Existing Prompt into a Skill

There are two ways to end up with a working skill. Section 8.4 walks through building one from scratch, step by step — that's the right approach when you're designing a new procedure and want full control over every part of it. But there's a faster path that works well once you already have something good: if you've got a prompt you've refined over time and reuse often — one that reliably gives you the output you want — you don't have to rebuild it into a skill by hand. You can hand that exact prompt to Claude and ask it to do the conversion for you.

This matters because the biggest obstacle to building your first skill usually isn't understanding the format — it's the blank-page problem of writing the instructions body from nothing. If you already have a prompt that works, that problem is solved. You're not starting from zero; you're translating something you know is good into a reusable, self-triggering package.

I use the prompt below regularly and want to turn it into a Claude
Skill so I don't have to retype or re-paste it every time.
Convert it into a complete SKILL.md file:
- Write a short, clear name for the skill.
- Write a specific, trigger-rich description that names the actual
situations, phrases, and content types that should cause this skill
to activate — this is the most important part, so make it detailed
rather than generic.
- Turn the body of my prompt into a clear, numbered instructions
section, preserving every rule and constraint I included — don't
drop or soften anything.
- Keep any placeholders I used (like [name] or [topic]) so the skill
still works for different situations each time it's invoked, rather
than only for one specific case.
Here is my prompt:
[paste your existing, working prompt here]

Run this once on a prompt you already trust, and you'll typically get a complete, usable SKILL.md back in a single pass — one you can then test and refine using the same process in sections 8.4 and 8.6. This is the fastest route to your very first skill: pick one prompt from earlier in this guide that you've already used more than once (a strong candidate from Module 5's business systems, or the social repurposing pack in section 4.7), and run it through this conversion before building anything from scratch.

Or let Claude do the whole thing. In Customize → Skills → + Add, choose Create with Claude, paste your prompt, and say, "Turn this into a skill." Claude will ask a few questions, build the SKILL.md, and add it for you.

Other sections mentioned above are in the full guide.