Intel / post

Three routes to structured LLM output, including constrained decoding

Terms in this piece · Glossary

LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
structured output — Forcing a model's response to match a schema, so downstream code can parse it instead of guessing at prose.
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.

Why it matters

Clarifies the tradeoff between re-prompting and : one pays for retries, the other enforces the schema at generation time.