If Claude keeps writing too long, give it a word budget per section instead of a total

Small thing that fixed a recurring annoyance for me.

Telling it "keep it short" or "under 500 words" never really worked. It'd blow past or pad to hit the number.

What works better: budget by section. "Intro: 2 sentences. Each point: 3 sentences max. No conclusion." It respects per-section limits much more reliably than a total word count, probably because it can hold a small local constraint better than a global one.

Also "no conclusion" as an explicit instruction is the single best thing I've added to my prompts. Kills the recap paragraph dead.

Took me embarrassingly long to land on. What other small length-control tricks are people using?