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kid64 • yesterday at 6:00 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

The thesis here seems to be that delimiters provide important context for Claude, and for that putpose we should use XML.

The article even references English's built-in delimiter, the quotation mark, which is reprented as a token for Claude, part of its training data.

So are we sure the lesson isn't simply to leverage delimiters, such as quotation marks, in prompts, period? The article doesn't identify any way in which XML is superior to quotation marks in scenarios requiring the type of disambiguation quotation marks provide.

Rather, the example XML tags shown seem to be serving as a shorthand for notating sections of the prompt ("treat this part of the prompt in this particular way"). That's useful, but seems to be addressing concerns that are separate from those contemplated by the author.

Replies

sheept • yesterday at 8:20 PM

XML is a bit more special/first class to Claude because it uses XML for tool calling:

    <antml:invoke name="Read">                                                    
      <antml:parameter name="file_path">/path/to/file</antml:parameter>             
      <antml:parameter name="offset">100</antml:parameter>                          
      <antml:parameter name="limit">50</antml:parameter>                            
    </antml:invoke>
I'm sure Claude can handle any delimiter and pseudo markup you throw at it, but one benefit of XML delimiters over quotation marks is that you repeat the delimiter name at the end, which I'd imagine might help if its contents are long (it certainly helps humans).
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jinushaun • yesterday at 6:35 PM

Except quotation marks look like regular text. I regularly use quotes in prompts for, ya know, quotes.

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