Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What is solved, and what is not As of early 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini all support native structured output. The ecosystem has converged on the capability, and the argument that dominated 2023 and 2024 — whether a language model can be made to emit parseable JSON reliably — is finished. On a single provider, with constrained decoding switched on, schema compliance at the syntactic level is effectively guaranteed. Not likely. Guaranteed, by construction, for the reasons set out in the next section. That is a genuine and underappreciated win. It is also, in most production systems, about a third of the problem. Two things remain unsolved, and both of them are the sort of problem that shows up long after the demo. The first is portability. A schema is not a neutral artefact…
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