Question

A financial analyst uses Claude to evaluate loan applications. She wants Claude to reason step-by-step through each application's risk factors before giving a final approval decision, but her downstream system only needs the final decision (APPROVE or DENY) so it can be parsed automatically. What is the best prompting approach to satisfy both needs?

Accepted Answer

Instruct Claude to put its reasoning inside tags and its final decision inside tags, so the reasoning happens before the answer while the parseable output stays isolated.

Answer

Instruct Claude to output only APPROVE or DENY with no reasoning, to keep the response easy to parse.

Answer

Lower the temperature to 0 so Claude reasons internally and returns only the final decision.

Answer

Ask Claude to give the decision first, then explain its reasoning afterward for transparency.