Asking nicely

Larkspur’s order system wants the assistant’s answers as JSON it can read without a person: a status field, a team, a number of days. The team starts the simple way, by asking Larkspur mini, the tiny model you met in Transformers, for JSON.

This chapter: Does asking a model for JSON get you JSON?

You will learn

Why a request in the prompt is not a guarantee of format
What a model writes when it has never seen the format you ask for

Words you’ll meet (2)

JSON: A plain text format for data: curly braces around fields, each a quoted name, a colon and a value, like {"status":"delayed"}. Programs read it without guessing.
Structured output: An answer in a fixed, machine-readable shape (usually JSON) instead of free prose.

The picture on the left is live. Each step below asks you to do one thing in it; the story continues here as you go.

Step 1 of 4

Larkspur’s order system reads the assistant’s answers with a program, not a person. It wants JSON: fields in curly braces, like {"status":"delayed"}. Larkspur mini is the tiny model from Transformers, trained only on Larkspur’s documents, running here in your browser. The simplest plan: ask for JSON in the prompt.

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