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...

▲

saltsucker 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	swingboy 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Anthropic’s best practices still include the use of XML: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
	▲	adastra22 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A year or so ago XML worked more reliably for long-lived prompt instructions. Now it is cargo culting.