Stop writing longer prompts. Do this instead! 🧠
Use dataset distillation and fine-tuning instead of longer prompts to enforce consistent structured outputs.
“Prompting tells the model what you want right now. Fine-tuning teaches the model a pattern it can follow repeatedly.”
A Google I/O developer tip argues that for consistent structured outputs (like valid JSON), prompting alone is brittle and developers should instead use dataset distillation—having a frontier model generate clean training data to fine-tune a smaller, faster model. It matters most for developers using open-weight models who need repeatable, reliable formatting. The insight is practical but represents established best practice rather than a major industry signal.