YAML Output Contracts

YAML earns its place when humans both read and edit the output. Configuration, infrastructure-as-code, CI pipelines, runbooks. Compared to JSON it's easier to read, supports comments, and tolerates trailing commas — at the cost of indentation sensitivity and a famously surprising type system.

For code-only consumption with strict typing, prefer JSON (prompt-engineering-output-json). For prose-with-structure, prefer markdown (prompt-engineering-output-structured).

When to use YAML