Asking nicely in the prompt gets you most of the way and fails on the tail, which is where the automation breaks. Constrained decoding can guarantee the shape of completed output for supported schemas. Interrupted generations still need a failure path, and compilation has a latency cost.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.
Asking nicely in the prompt gets you most of the way and fails on the tail, which is where the automation breaks. Constrained decoding can guarantee the shape of completed output for supported schemas. Interrupted generations still need a failure path, and compilation has a latency cost.
Nothing here yet. Say how you would answer it.
