Apparently 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.
Comments 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
One 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.
Apparently 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/anthropic...
Comments 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
Anthropic’s best practices still include the use of XML: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
XML consistently performed better than markdown and JSON in all evals I've ever seen on any model, except for a couple very specific ones.
A year or so ago XML worked more reliably for long-lived prompt instructions. Now it is cargo culting.
One 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.
XML stands for Xtra ML....
I'd like to switch to a sales career--can you give me any pointers?