Ask HN: What is a good format for a tool to report data to a LLM?
TL;DR
For CLI tools, humans like visually organized text possibly with colors or TUIs. Machines likes tabs-separated tabular data, or json and similar. What's the equivalent for LLMs for tabular or structured data? What makes them grasp the data easily and efficiently?
Nauti's Take
The question points at a real advantage: choosing a tool's output format deliberately cuts token cost and error rates in a measurable way. The catch is that solid benchmarking barely exists here, mostly gut feel from individual projects.
Anyone building agents should test two formats against each other rather than trust a single forum recommendation.
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