Question

A team is building a two-step pipeline where the first Claude call extracts key clauses from a legal contract, and a second Claude call classifies each extracted clause as favorable, neutral, or risky. During testing, the second call frequently fails to parse the first call's output because the extracted clauses arrive as inconsistent prose paragraphs. What is the best way to make this prompt chain reliable?

Accepted Answer

Instruct the first call to return the extracted clauses in a consistent structured format (such as XML tags or JSON) that the second call is designed to consume.

Answer

Merge both steps into a single prompt so there is no handoff between calls.

Answer

Increase the temperature on the first call so it produces more varied clause descriptions.

Answer

Raise the max_tokens limit on the second call so it can process longer paragraphs.