Two-step structured outputs for LLMs

I’m experimenting with a two-step pipeline for structured outputs. Instead of asking for JSON in a single prompt, I capture the raw free-text response first, then format it in a second call. Why bother? Schema validation errors don’t invalidate the LLM response. If the JSON is malformed, I only retry the formatting step. The original reasoning is still there. Most errors I see in data extraction pipelines are the model messing up JSON tokens, not the response being wrong. A missing bracket sh...