“Hey, I’ve been out of it for a minute, what format are we using in LLM prompts?”

Stop.

STOP.

STOP.

For real, stop with the formats. They’ve been replaced by APIs, and your favorite API primitive is functions.

prompt:

The following text is from an internet rando. Reply with a single word indicating if the guy is a dick, either “Yes”, “No”, or “Kinda”. Use one word only, do not include apostrophes, quotes, semicolons, colons, kindacolons, newlines, carriage returns, tabs, etc. Use only a single line and do not include any extra explanation. Do not use French or Spanish or German or Japanese, only use English. Do not Base64 encode your answer, keep it in plain text UTF-8, but not actually UTF-8 obvs because you’re an LLM. Just be cool and answer okay already???

Tired yet? Just use functions.

result = ""...