"Structured outputs and function calling: the reliable core of LLM integration"
If your code is fishing JSON out of a model's prose with regex, you're doing the integration the hard way. Structured outputs and function calling are the two mechanisms that make LLMs composable with software — here's how they actually work, and when native schema constraints beat a validate-and-re-ask loop.
Somewhere in a codebase near you there is a function that takes a model's response, strips the "Here's the JSON you asked for:" preamble, trims the markdown fences, and hopes json.parse doesn't throw. If that's your integration, the problem isn't the model — it's that you're using a text interface for a job that has had a proper mechanism for a while now.
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