[benedictmendoza]

Thanks, good question. I still treat the model as “mostly helpful but not fully trusted,” even when using structured outputs / tool calls.

Those APIs definitely help, but in practice I still run into things like required fields coming back empty, weird edge cases that technically pass the schema, or just timeouts / rate limits breaking the pipeline.

So SafeParse still validates the response again and retries if something looks wrong. It can also fall back to another model if the provider is having issues.

I mostly think of provider-side structured outputs as improving the baseline, and SafeParse handling the messy operational stuff once these pipelines run continuously in production.