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Hate it all you want, but XML is genuinely a good fit there, and Claude is apparently insanely good at working with XML prompts.
by giancarlostoro 5mo ago
Hate it all you want, but XML is genuinely a good fit there, and Claude is apparently insanely good at working with XML prompts.
- geraneum 5mo agoI don’t know why, but I get this feeling whenever someone uses “insanely” or “shockingly” along with AI, I think they’re bot or are writing based on a guideline! No offense, btw, I’m not saying you’re a bot.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoYou’re absolutely right! Kidding, nah no worries. I do worry people become overly paranoid of bots as time passes.
- geraneum 5mo agoThere’s a good reason for that: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96372-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96372-1
- rspeele 5mo agoI'm prepared to excise the word "genuinely" from my vocabulary after working with Claude. One of my biggest fears with using AI at work is that I will subconsciously start talking and writing like a bot, despite making conscious efforts to do the opposite. Just like how when you read a lot of books by one author, their style infects your own writing style.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoIs Claude good at working with XML prompts, or is XML good at convincing users to write more Claude-able specs? I am intensely skeptical that you could write an XML document describing a nontrivial web application in full detail, but I could easily imagine someone who thinks they have to stripping out important details because they don't really map to XML.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoThey train it with XML even the system prompts that Claude reads are formatted by it.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoI haven't done it professionally, but my understanding is that this kind of work is much more in the second category, where you have to understand the closest approximation to what you want that the LLM can reliably produce or the training won't work at all.