Agents
Structured output
Forcing a model to answer in a defined shape — JSON matching a schema — so software can rely on it.
Free text is fine for humans and terrible for code. Structured output constrains the model to produce data in a shape you specify, validated before anything downstream touches it.
The real benefit is not tidiness, it is failing loudly. A malformed response gets rejected at the boundary rather than quietly writing bad data into your database.
In practice this is done with a schema library — Zod in TypeScript, Pydantic in Python — that both instructs the model and validates the reply.