I noticed that it thought that GoatInGrey wrote “openai is no longer relevant.” However, they were just quoting a different user (buyucu) who was the person who first wrote that.
I originally did that to save on tokens but modern models have much larger input windows so I may not need to do that any more.
IMO, (Strict)YAML is a very good alternative, it has even been suggested to me by multiple LLMs when I asked them what they thought the best format for presenting conversations to an LLM would be. It is very easy to chunk simple YAML and present it to an LLM directly off the wire: you only need to remember to repeat the indentation and names of all higher level keys (properties) pertaining to the current chunk at the top of the chunk, then start a text block containing the remaining text in the chunk, and the LLM will happily take it from there:
topic:
subtopic:
text: |
Subtopic text for this chunk.
Keeping the indentation is also important because it is an implicit and repeated indication of the nesting level of the content that follows. LLMs have trouble with balancing nested parentheses (as the sibling comment to yours explains).
Dealing with text where indentation matters is easier for LLMs, and because they have been exposed to large amounts of it (such as Python code and lists of bullet points) during training, they have learned to handle this quite well.