Promptles
Output Format

Specify Output Format

Tell Claude not just what to do, but how to present the result. Asking for a diff, a complete file, a bullet list, or a table gives you output you can immediately use instead of output you have to reformat.

Where you'll practice this

4 Promptles scenarios teach this principle directly. Each one drops you into a real engineering ticket and asks you to write the prompt you'd send to Claude Code.

  • Debug with Format

    Your API endpoint `/api/orders` is returning orders with dates in inconsistent formats: some as ISO strings, some as Unix timestamps, some as "MM/DD/YYYY". The frontend is crashing because it expects ISO strings everywhere. You need Claude to fix the API response formatter and…

  • The Scheduled Report

    You want a Python script called `daily_report.py` that connects to a PostgreSQL database, queries yesterday's total sales grouped by region, and writes a Markdown file `report.md` with a summary table. The database connection string is in the `DATABASE_URL` environment variable.…

  • The Report Generator

    You have a JSON file `tickets.json` containing an array of customer support tickets. Each ticket has: `id` (string), `category` (string like 'billing', 'technical', 'onboarding'), `priority` (string: 'low', 'medium', 'high'), `resolved` (boolean), and `resolution_time_hours`…

  • The curl Conversion

    A backend teammate dropped six curl commands into Slack covering your team's internal `notes-service` API: list notes, get note by id, create note, update note, delete note, and search notes. They want you to import these into a shared Postman collection so the rest of the team…

Other principles in Output Format