Anthropic's flagship product is the Claude chatbot, built on various Claude family models, including the very powerful Sonnet 3.5. But the real powerful tool from the AI Lab is its console, which has just been given a major upgrade.

The console is a developer technology, but anyone with a Claude account can access it and take the prompts to a whole new level.

The biggest upgrade is to build better prompts that can be used by Claude and other chatbots and AI systems. This includes building prompts for image and video generators like Midjourney and Runway.

All new features will be built using the sonnet model of Claude 3.5 and will allow for natural language input - so simply describe what you want and it will create prompts that the AI can understand better, including more description.

Every AI lab has a different way to interact with its models. For most, the primary connection is through chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Others use it through document editor tools, such as Docs for Gemini and Word for Copilot.

In each of these interfaces, you have the most powerful model with important moderation and guardrails. There are also other limitations that make it work for a wide range of readers and non-technical readers. The developer interface is different and often more flexible.

Console is Claude's developer interface and works with Claude Sonnet 3.5. The latest version includes a prompt builder, data generator, and a prompt testing tool.

The console's most powerful feature is the prompt generator; creating useful, descriptive, working prompts that elicit exactly what you want from the AI is as much an art form as writing an essay or drawing a picture. Now AI can help you talk to AI.

Alex Albert, a developer relations and prompting expert at Anthropic, explained that all you need to do is enter a description of the task and Claude will turn it into a high-quality prompt.

For example, I opened the prompt editor and gave the following instructions: "Create a short story and the prompt needed for the AI video editor to describe that story, a descriptive prompt of 5 seconds per shot and 500 characters or less per shot. Please assume that the prompts will be 5 seconds per shot and no more than 500 words per shot. Please keep this in mind when creating your prompts.

The AI then broke down how the response should be laid out, refined it into a complex, multi-layered prompt, and even generated example stories.

Running the prompt in the console asked for the length of the story and the number of shots, essentially creating a customizable interface for this prompt that went beyond simple text input. I was presented with a complex story and shots broken down one by one to fit the story.

My own very simple prompt produced similar results, but with no additional detail and little consistency between the shots and the short story. However, I was not able to write a story, only a prompt for an AI video.

Unlike Claude's chatbot, the Anthropic console uses a prepaid credit system charged by tokens. It costs roughly $3 per million tokens entered and roughly $15 per million tokens output.

This may seem like a lot, but one million tokens equals about one million characters of text, or about 200,000 words. In the example above, 8,600 tokens were used for input and 2,800 for output, at a cost of about 7c.

It is also more complicated to prompt, as there is no default system prompt to tell you how to respond. You could ask them to respond like a pirate.

I prefer chatbots, but the console provides a different, more powerful way to interact with the model. It is a little like working in a terminal or command line. It performs the same functions as a desktop application, but you can specify more specifically how it should be performed.