I usually have Claude build a plan first, then I put it into an XML file it updates with phases, usually we talk about some of those tasks, and then once its good and I like it, I have Claude implement the plan.
Another thing I tell Claude to do is to not guess, but look at documentation, it messes up a lot less, might use some tokens reading docs, but at least it has a higher success rate code wise.
One reason to use XML-like formatting is that it makes the beginning and end of sections explicit. This is less of an issue when the model is generating text but can still be helpful when using templated prompts.
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.
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
Another thing I tell Claude to do is to not guess, but look at documentation, it messes up a lot less, might use some tokens reading docs, but at least it has a higher success rate code wise.