The shift from free-text LLM responses to guaranteed JSON schema conformance is quietly eliminating entire categories of production ML infrastructure. What used to require custom parsers, regex extraction, retry loops, and validation layers is now a single API parameter.
But the real insight is upstream: when you design your system around structured outputs from the start, you don’t need the “extract then validate then retry” pipeline at all. The schema becomes the contract between your AI and your business logic. This is exactly the pattern we use at Darmis for form extraction — every field maps to a typed schema with confidence scores, not a bag of text that downstream code has to interpret.