Domain 4: Prompt Engineering & Structured Output

Domain 4 is where specificity beats emphasis. Asking for higher confidence, more care, or a conservative approach changes nothing measurable; a categorical criterion, a worked example, or a schema does. The domain then draws one line and examines it repeatedly: tool use with a JSON schema eliminates SYNTAX errors and leaves SEMANTIC ones untouched. A response that validates can still put a figure in the wrong field, and everything about validation and retry follows from that gap.

What the guide measures here

1. Design prompts with explicit criteria to improve precision and reduce false positives
2. Apply few-shot prompting to improve output consistency and quality
3. Enforce structured output using tool use and JSON schemas
4. Implement validation, retry, and feedback loops for extraction quality
5. Design efficient batch processing strategies
6. Design multi-instance and multi-pass review architectures

The order to learn them in