Structured Outputs Are the Contract Your AI Agent Is Missing

Free-text agent responses look great in demos. They fall apart the moment you try to automate anything downstream. Here's the pattern that fixes it. Your AI agent just summarized a payer's response to a benefits verification request. The output reads beautifully: "The patient's coverage appears to be active under the Gold Plus plan. Prior authorization is likely required based on the payer's language, though this isn't entirely clear. The copay seems to be around $50-75, and there may be a quantity limit of 30 tablets per month." Now try writing code that processes that. Does "appears to be active" mean coverage is confirmed? Is prior auth required or not? What's the copay — $50 or $75? And good luck extracting "30 tablets per month" reliably when the next response says "one month supply" or "qty limit: 30 units." This is the problem that structured outputs solve. And once I started treating them as the contract between the LLM and the rest of my system, every other design decision got