Practice - audit your plugin boundaries

Most people using Claude for multiple tasks are already running an informal constellation. The problem is that the boundaries are implicit and the register contamination is invisible until the output starts degrading in ways that feel like model limitations.

This exercise makes the contamination visible.

What you are auditing

Your existing Claude prompts. Every role you ask Claude to play. Every system prompt, persona instruction, or "act as" that you have written or saved.

If you do not have formal prompts, audit your conversation habits. What do you ask Claude to do in a single conversation, and in what order?

Step 1 — Inventory

List every distinct role you ask Claude to play. Writer, coder, designer, strategist, researcher, editor, reviewer, formatter, summarizer — whatever applies. Be honest about granularity. "Writer" might actually be three roles: product copy writer, technical documentation writer, and email ghostwriter. These have different registers.

Step 2 — Read for register

Take each prompt or role description and read it for register. Ask: is this written in one craft's vocabulary, or does it shift? A prompt that opens with instructions for persuasive writing and then includes a section on code review has shifted registers. Flag it.

Then read each output you have saved. Does the output stay in one register throughout, or does it shift mid-piece? A paragraph that writes like Hemingway for three sentences and then writes like a product manager for two sentences is showing register contamination.

Step 3 — Find the split points

For each flagged prompt or output, identify where the split should go. What is the artifact that the first craft produces? What does the second craft receive? Write the interface sentence.

If you cannot write the interface sentence, the split is in the wrong place. Look for a different seam.

Step 4 — Rewrite one prompt

Pick the most contaminated prompt from your inventory. Rewrite it as two separate prompts: one per craft. Each prompt should pass the three-question test from Lesson 5: one-sentence description, three exemplars, and a clear negative space.

Do not rewrite all of them today. One is enough to learn the pattern. The others will follow naturally once the pattern is clear.

If you get stuck

If you cannot see register contamination in your prompts, look at your outputs instead. Find an output that felt slightly off — competent but not quite right. Read it for the moment when it stops being in one register and starts being in another. Then trace that moment back to the prompt.

If your prompts are very short (under 50 words), they may not show contamination directly. In that case, look at the conversation. Is there a message where you asked Claude to shift tasks? That shift is the unwritten seam.

Cross-reference

Lesson 6 (Why mixed registers fail) gave the theory. This practice gives you the diagnosis against your own work.

Deliverable

A cleaned-up set of personas — at minimum, one rewritten prompt that has been split into two. Each persona: single craft, one-sentence description, one-paragraph voice document. Save them where you will actually use them, not in a folder you will not open.