Data Pipelines and Contracts
The model did not break. The upstream team renamed a column, and the model kept running — silently feeding a now-empty (or misaligned) feature into every prediction, with no error, no crash, and no obvious symptom until someone notices the metrics have quietly degraded.
Structured Output
withstructuredoutput wraps a chat model so it returns a validated Pydantic object instead of prose you then have to parse. The provider enforces the schema at generation time (constrained decoding or native tool-calling), which is far more reliable than parsing free-form output after the fact.