Structured Prompting: Does Format or Meaning Drive the Gains?
“Structured” is doing too much work Ask ten engineers whether structured prompts beat unstructured ones and most will say yes. Ask them what “structured” means and you’ll get ten different answers: using Markdown headings, switching to JSON, splitting instructions across files, being more explicit about rules. These aren’t the same thing — and conflating them is why the evidence on “does structure help?” looks so contradictory. If you want to reason about persona specs, system prompts, or AGENTS.md files clearly, it helps to split “structure” into two independent axes. ...