[gwillen85]

I agree but LLMs are very good at generating XML. Additionally SCXML which AgentML extends has been around and finalized for over 15 years. So generating AgentML works incredibly well.

[mentalgear]

I get your point, however I wonder how much better they are than JSON when using structured output endpoints, which is likely what you would want to use with such a format.

[gwillen85]

That's a fair point. We're considering adding JSON as a first-class citizen alongside XML - similar to OpenAPI supporting both JSON and YAML.

But you're right that structured output endpoints make JSON generation more reliable, so supporting both formats long-term makes sense.

[leetrout]

I'm also curious if you know if anyone has any definitive test sets on this? Kind of like how Simon Willison uses the bird on the bicycle?

[gwillen85]

Good question - we're working on case studies for this.

My theory: models are heavily trained on HTML/XML and many use XML tags in their own system prompts, so they're naturally fluent in that syntax. Makes nested structures more reliable in our testing.

Structured output endpoints help JSON a lot though.