Boosting Claude Code performance
with prompt learning
Simple, Effective, Data-Driven Prompt Optimization
Arize Builders Meetup NYC - 2026-03-12
A quick shout-out
What are we doing today?
- Prompt Learning on Claude Code
- SWE-Bench Lite: up to 11% improvement
- No fine-tuning. No new tools. No architecture changes.
A tweet
The Memento problem
System prompts are bigger than you think
CLAUDE.md is yours
Most people's CLAUDE.md
is terrible
A benchmark to measure against
SWE-Bench Lite
- 300 real GitHub issues
- Popular open-source Python repositories
- Ground-truth patches + test suites
Why SWE-Bench?
Why SWE-Bench is hard
Our starting point
What is Prompt Learning?
Reinforcement Learning
Standard RL:
effective but expensive
- Sample inefficient
- Slow and expensive
- Opaque: what do weight changes mean?
- Overkill when LLMs are already great
Prompt Learning: the same loop, different algorithm
Why English feedback beats a score
What the meta-prompt does
We did this with Cline first
Why GPT-4.1 for Cline?
The Cline optimization loop
Cline results
The GPT-4.1 story
Now: Claude Code
Part 1: Rollouts
Part 2: Generate English feedback
Evals make all the difference
Part 3: Meta-prompting
The before: an empty file
The after: twenty rules
Rule one
Fix code at the correct hierarchy level
so all code paths benefit, not just downstream consumers.Rule two
Maintain backward compatibility and consistency
with test expectations in error/warning behavior.Rule three
Warn before raising errors
when deprecating usage
to allow user code transitions.Rule four
Ensure correct dependency and execution order
in combined or chained operations.The pattern in these rules
Cross-repo results
The Django result
20% better!
The honest framing
What this is really doing
But that's overfit!
Your git history as a training set
Sample efficiency
What you can do right now
The manual version
Even without closed issues
What makes a good rule
Applies to all coding agents
- Cursor: .cursorrules
- Cline: .clinerules
- Windsurf: .windsurfrules
- Claude Code: CLAUDE.md
Claude Code already does this for itself
The open source
github.com/Arize-ai/prompt-learning
Six rules to take away
- 1. Your CLAUDE.md is underutilized
- 2. Let your failures tell you what to write
- 3. Repo-specific beats generic
- 4. Your git history is a training set
- 5. The automation is optional
- 6. This works on any coding agent
A bigger picture:
Self-improving softwarae
Thank you
Boosting Claude Code performance with prompt learning
By Laurie Voss
