Read time: 10 minutes

This month comes with a few surprises! 🙋‍♀️

Hi everyone! May’s been an interesting one…

Claude 4 launched with big claims about being the "best model" on some measures, so I've gotten the same question from newsletter readers, course students, and clients I'm working with:

Is Claude 4 actually better than 3.7 in any meaningful ways? I put together some quick tests to find out and I’ll share one today.

I also looked into Anthropic's newly published system prompts - the core instructions that shape how Claude behaves. Understanding these helps explain why Claude responds the way it does in our research workflows (and one instruction actually made me trust it more).

Plus, there's a term that's suddenly everywhere in AI. It's still very new (most teams I talk to aren't using it yet), but it represents AI that can actually provide the kind of value we’ve been hoping for (no, not AI that does your laundry - yet).

⭐️ And now comes the really big news before we get into this ⭐️

Your subscription is cancelled from June 1st.

But don't worry! You'll still get the newsletter - I'm making it FREE!

Here’s why (skip to the newsletter content if you don’t care)

When I launched this newsletter, I was freshly back from parental leave without childcare and at capacity (or beyond it) with client work. I had an idea for a newsletter I felt needed to exist, but I had zero time for it. So I gave myself one rule: if I was going to do this, it had to prove it deserved my time.

That's why I charged €5 for this newsletter from day one. It was a demand test. A way to make sure this newsletter would matter to people like you.

The test worked. The conversations and feedback I've gotten over the last year have been some of my most energizing moments. There are also quite a lot of you here 🤝.

But I’ve been debating this choice with myself for months.

On one side, I feel strongly that it’s important to set industry standards for creators to get paid for their work. On the other, my strategy has changed. My core revenue now comes from other parts of my business. That made me rethink this newsletter’s role in the bigger picture.

Making this free lets me focus on reach and impact, not revenue. There are so many people out there who still feel underserved and lacking support around AI in the bite-size pieces they can commit to monthly. If I’m blocking them from starting out and making progress with that €5 barrier, right now that’s at odds with my mission.

What's not changing: I’m sticking to the same promise I started with - workflow upgrades, faster AI decisions, and the AI news you actually need to know. All focused on customer research. In <20 minutes per month.

Thanks for all your support. If you’re enjoying this content, now you can actually tell your friends about it (because it’s free from June!) 😄

Here comes the May edition -

In this edition:

1. 👩‍🔬 Claude 4 vs Claude 3.7 — is there a difference? A quick test to see how the latest model reasons (and whether it does it better).

2. 🔬 Claude 4’s system prompts and what they mean for users. Anthropic’s latest published core model prompts and what their instructions tell us about Claude’s behaviors.

3. 🔁 What’s an “MCP”? The term that’s suddenly everywhere, and how it applies to people like us.

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