Question

A data analyst is building a workflow where Claude must (1) extract key financial figures from lengthy quarterly reports, (2) analyze those figures for year-over-year trends, and (3) produce an executive summary. When the analyst tries to do all three in a single prompt, Claude frequently drops figures, mixes up the analysis, and produces inconsistent summaries. Which prompt engineering technique should the analyst apply to improve reliability?

Accepted Answer

Prompt chaining: break the task into separate sequential prompts, passing each step's output as input to the next

Answer

Prefill the assistant response with the final executive summary format to force consistency

Answer

Add more few-shot examples of complete reports inside the single prompt to cover every case

Answer

Switch to a smaller, faster model to reduce the chance of errors on the long input