Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems

A research paper studied how to present large amounts of structured data (like SQL databases with thousands of tables) to AI language models in different formats (YAML, Markdown, JSON, and TOON) to help them generate correct code. The study found that more advanced models like GPT and Gemini performed much better than open-source models, and that using unfamiliar data formats like TOON actually made models less efficient because they spent extra effort trying to understand the new format.