If you’ve been using OpenAI’s JSON mode and calling it “structured output,” you’re building on a guarantee that’s weaker than it looks. JSON mode promises syntactically valid JSON. It does not promise that status will be a string, that confidence will be a float, or that items won’t quietly disappear from the response entirely. In production, that distinction costs you. We’ve watched pipelines collapse at 3am because a field the downstream queue worker expected simply wasn’t there, and JSON mode had no complaint. Using OpenAI structured outputs in Laravel, specifically response_format with type: json_schema and strict: true , closes that gap. Schema compliance is enforced at the generation level using constrained decoding. The model literally cannot emit a token that would violate your schema.…