The API surface and prompting techniques used to drive a served model.

The pages in this section are listed below in the recommended reading order.

  • OpenAI-compatible API Understand the de facto standard inference API and what compatibility does and does not guarantee.
  • Anthropic-compatible API Understand the Anthropic Messages API shape and how it differs from the OpenAI-compatible surface.
  • Function calling Let a model request the execution of tools you define, and handle those requests safely.
  • Structured outputs Constrain model output to a schema so downstream systems can consume it reliably.
  • Model Context Protocol Understand MCP as a standard interface between models and external tools and data sources.
  • Prompt engineering Techniques for constructing prompts that produce reliable output, and how to evaluate them.
  • LLM inference parameters Understand the sampling and decoding parameters exposed at request time and their effects.