A developer has a prompt engineering challenge: they need Claude to fill in a form that has 20 fields, but…

Question

A developer has a prompt engineering challenge: they need Claude to fill in a form that has 20 fields, but typically only 5-8 fields are relevant for any given request. The remaining fields should be null. Using structured output with all 20 fields as required causes Claude to hallucinate values for irrelevant fields. What schema design fixes this?

Accepted Answer

A. Make all 20 fields optional (nullable) with clear descriptions indicating when each field applies

Answer

B. Use a dynamic schema generated per-request based on the input context

Answer

C. Keep all fields required but add a 'confidence' field alongside each to flag uncertain values

Answer

D. Create 4 different schemas for different form types, each with only the relevant required fields

Question 271