From Prompts to Real Files: A Developer's Guide to AI File Generation

Major LLM vendors including Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini now support generating real files such as PDFs, spreadsheets, and charts from prompts via their APIs, using sandboxed code execution environments. The universal pattern consists of three steps: tool declaration, sandboxed execution with pre-installed libraries, and file retrieval. The article provides working code examples for each vendor, highlighting Claude's full-featured approach with persistent containers, bash access, and a Files API.