I built a customized deep research internally earlier this year that is made up of multiple "agentic" steps, each focusing on specific information to find. And the outputs of those steps are always in json and then the input for the next step. Sure you can work you way around failures by doing retries but its just one less thing to think about if you can guarantee that the random LLM output adheres at least to some sort of structure.
I implemented structured outputs for Claude that way here: https://github.com/simonw/llm-anthropic/blob/500d277e9b4bec6...
This trick has also been in llama.cpp for a couple of years: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/llama-cpp-python-grammars
Like, you'd end your prompt like this: 'Provide the response in JSON: {"data":'
barefootford•47m ago