Claude Cookbook

Claude Cookbook is the kind of practical resource you actually want on your bookmarks bar, especially if you’re building agentic apps or multi-tool workflows. It reads like a toolbox, full of recipes you can use right away, and it covers everything from latency hacks to multimodal tricks.

Start simple, then build up. The Cookbook introduces Programmatic Tool Calling (PTC), which lets Claude write code that calls tools directly, reducing latency and token use. It also shows how to scale to thousands of tools using semantic embeddings for dynamic tool discovery, and how to manage long conversations with Automatic Context Compaction (so you don’t run out of context in the middle of a task). Practical, and very necessary.

There are neat, focused guides too, like giving Claude a crop tool to zoom into image regions, which helps when you’re analyzing charts or scanned documents, and a guide to prompting for frontend aesthetics, which saves you from the blah-looking UIs we’ve all seen before. The Cookbook also covers skills for Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF, so Claude can create documents, crunch numbers, and automate reports for you.

A few real examples (because examples stick): build a low-latency voice assistant using ElevenLabs, create a research agent with WebSearch, or set up GitHub monitoring via MCP servers. I’ve used similar context compaction tricks on long-running projects, and the token savings were noticeable, which is a nice little win.

If you’re exploring Claude for product work, research, or automation, this collection is a solid next step. It mixes conceptual guidance with code snippets and patterns you can copy and adapt. Give it a look, try one recipe, and iterate.

Read the full Cookbook here: https://platform.claude.com/cookbook.