How do I make Claude give short answers permanently, without repeating it every chat?
A Reddit user and their boss are struggling with Claude's overly long responses, often receiving five paragraphs, headers, and a summary for simple questions. This leads to skimming and missing important information. They are seeking a permanent solution to make Claude provide shorter answers, specifically looking for exact instruction text to input into "Settings > General > Profile > Instructions for Claude" to avoid repeating the request in every chat.
- Published
- Sep 7, 2026, 01:57
- Source type
- Dev community
- Tier
- Community
- Source status
- Healthy
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More details
My boss and I both use Claude for work and we keep hitting the same problem: the responses are way too long. We ask a simple question and get five paragraphs plus headers plus a summary. Both of us end up skimming and missing things.
I know you can tell it "be brief" in a chat, and I know you can put instructions in a project. But I don't want to do that every single time or per project. I want it set once, account-wide, applied to every new chat by default.
What I've tried or looked at:
- Settings > General > Profile > Instructions for Claude
- Styles (Concise preset)
Questions:
- Which of those actually sticks across all new chats?
- Can you set a custom style as the default so you don't have to pick it each time?
- What wording actually works? Vague stuff like "be concise" doesn't seem to do much. Are specific rules better, like "answer in 3 sentences max, no preamble, no recap, no closing questions"?
- Does any of this carry over to mobile and desktop, or is it web only?
Anyone who has this dialed in, I'd love to see your exact instruction text.