Without format instructions, the AI guesses how to structure output — and its guess is almost never optimized for your workflow.
Format control means specifying: length, structure, schema, delimiters, and what to exclude. One of the easiest quality improvements at zero extra cost.
Parse this email into structured data for our ATS. Return ONLY valid JSON — no markdown backticks, no explanation, no text before or after.
Schema (null for missing fields): { "name": string, "email": string, "role_applied": string, "years_experience": number, "current_company": string | null, "salary_expectation_usd": number | null, "earliest_start_date": string | null }
Parse "$165-185k" as the midpoint (175000). Parse "available in 4 weeks" as null — can't compute absolute dates.
Compare AWS, GCP, and DigitalOcean for a production Go API (~50k requests/day, managed PostgreSQL, Redis cache).
Return a markdown table ONLY. No intro, no conclusion, no explanation.
Columns: Criterion | AWS | GCP | DigitalOcean
Rows (include all, in this order):
Claude follows XML output format tags reliably: <output_format>Return only JSON matching schema</output_format>. Prefilling the assistant turn with '{' forces JSON mode.