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I usually have Claude build a plan first, then I put it into an XML file it updates with phases, usually we talk about some of those tasks, and then once its go
by giancarlostoro 4mo ago
I usually have Claude build a plan first, then I put it into an XML file it updates with phases, usually we talk about some of those tasks, and then once its good and I like it, I have Claude implement the plan.
Another thing I tell Claude to do is to not guess, but look at documentation, it messes up a lot less, might use some tokens reading docs, but at least it has a higher success rate code wise.
- xstas1 4mo agoXML??
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoApparently because of how Claude is trained, even the system level prompts go through as XML, it works better with XML "prompting" so I figured I could have it write plans in XML. I need to update my ticketing tool to output XML maybe by default. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1psxuv7/anthropics_official_take_on_xmlstructured/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1psxuv7/anthropic...
- saltsucker 4mo agoComments later in thread say markdown works just as fine and that it’s more important to organize your plan into sections. Also just think about it, why would a model trained on the world’s corpus of text (that isnt formatted in xml) perform better with XML? It would be a better study if that post tested markdown, org, xml, json, etc. 10 times to see if their is a difference
- adastra22 4mo agoA year or so ago XML worked more reliably for long-lived prompt instructions. Now it is cargo culting.
- swingboy 4mo agoAnthropic’s best practices still include the use of XML: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/claude-prompting-best-practices#structure-prompts-with-xml-tags https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
- orbital-decay 4mo agoXML consistently performed better than markdown and JSON in all evals I've ever seen on any model, except for a couple very specific ones.
- root-parent 4mo agoXML stands for Xtra ML....
- noworriesnate 4mo agoI'd like to switch to a sales career--can you give me any pointers?
- aesthesia 4mo agoOne reason to use XML-like formatting is that it makes the beginning and end of sections explicit. This is less of an issue when the model is generating text but can still be helpful when using templated prompts.