Question

You are building a chatbot that generates structured dialogue scripts. Each script line follows the format 'Speaker: text'. You want Claude to generate exactly one line of dialogue per API call and stop before it starts writing the next speaker's line. Which Messages API parameter should you configure to reliably halt generation at that point?

Accepted Answer

Set a stop_sequences value that matches the start of the next line's pattern

Answer

Lower the temperature to 0 so the model stops after one line

Answer

Set max_tokens to 1 to force a single output

Answer

Add a system prompt instructing the model to never produce more than one line