I think XML is good to know for prompting (similar to how <think></think> was popular for outputs, you can do that for other sections). But I have had much better experience just writing JSON and using line breaks, colons, etc. to demarcate sections.
E.g. instead of
<examples>
<ex1>
<input>....</input>
<output>.....</output>
</ex1>
<ex2>....</ex2>
...
</examples>
<instructions>....</instructions>
<input>{actual input}</input>
Just doing something like: ...instructions...
input: ....
output: {..json here}
...maybe further instructions...
input: {actual input}
Use case document processing/extraction (both with Haiku and OpenAI models), the latter example works much better than the XML.N of 1 anecdote anyway for one use case.
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Could you clarify, do those tags need to be tags which exist and we need to lear about them and how to use them? Or we can put inside them whatever we want and just by virtue of being tags, Claude understands them in a special way?
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