How to Save Prompts in Claude

Your past chats stay in Claude’s sidebar. To get back to an old one, you ask: “Can you find our conversation about the pricing page?” Claude searches your earlier chats and brings back what it finds. Anthropic lists this search for its paid plans: Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise.

What comes back is the content of a conversation. The prompt that produced it is somewhere inside, next to the versions you tried first. To reuse it you still open the chat, find the prompt, copy it and start again.

• Instructions for Claude are set once for your account and apply to every conversation. They are the place for who you are and how you want answers. They are always on, so they cannot hold a prompt you need once a week.
• Project instructions belong to a project: a workspace with its own chats and its own knowledge base. They apply only to chats inside that project. A free account can have five projects. Good for one ongoing piece of work, with one set of instructions each.
• Skills are packaged instructions that Claude loads when a task matches them; you can also pick one by typing a slash in the message box. A skill tells Claude how to do something: Anthropic describes it as loaded by Claude, not as text placed in the message box for you to edit.
• Shortcuts in Claude in Chrome, Anthropic’s own browser extension, are prompts you save and call with a slash. They live in that extension’s chat, on paid plans. Anthropic’s help centre describes nothing like them in the web app.

Anthropic’s help centre describes no list of saved prompts in the web app itself. Skills can travel as files, because they follow an open format that other tools read. Its pages describe no way to take the other instructions to another app.

1. Install PromptTray from the Chrome Web Store and open Claude. You do not need an account: prompts are saved in your browser, and signing in later adds sync and a backup.
2. Type or paste the prompt in the message box. A Save button appears in the box as soon as there is text.
3. Press Save. PromptTray’s panel opens with the prompt filled in and a title taken from its first line. Shorten the title, pick a category, add tags if you want them, and press Save Prompt.

To use it again, press CtrlShiftKControl Shift K in any chat. Spotlight opens over the page: type a few letters of the title and press Enter. The prompt is in the message box, and nothing is sent until you send it.

The prompts that pay back being saved are the ones you paste in front of a document or a draft: the instructions stay the same and only the material changes.

• Review a draft: “Review this draft for {audience}. List the three weakest arguments, say why each is weak, and suggest a fix for each. Do not rewrite the draft.”
• Summarize a long document: “Summarize this document in {length}. Keep every number and date, and list anything the author leaves unproven.”
• Explain code before changing it: “Explain what this code does, step by step, before you change anything. Then propose the smallest change that {goal}.”
• Turn notes into a brief: “Turn these notes into a one-page brief for {reader}: the decision needed, the options, and what each one costs.”

The words in curly braces are variables: PromptTray asks for them in a short form each time you insert the prompt. The guide to organizing AI prompts has the rules for titles, categories and tags.

The same library opens in 21 other apps, with the same shortcut. There is a guide like this one for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, and one on keeping one library across AI apps.

What this page says about Claude comes from Anthropic’s own pages, read on October 10, 2026: personalization, chat search and memory, projects, skills, the skills overview in its docs, the list of chats, Claude in Chrome. Apps change, so check there if something here looks out of date.