What is prompt chaining, and why do production systems need output parsers?
Complex tasks rarely fit one prompt, and free-text LLM output rarely plugs into code cleanly. The signal is decomposing into chained steps and parsing each output. Here is the answer that connects prompting to real pipelines.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Complex tasks rarely fit one prompt, and free-text LLM output rarely plugs into code cleanly. The signal is decomposing into chained steps and parsing each output. Here is the answer that connects prompting to real pipelines.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.