Bedrock Structured Outputs: From Begging to Contract

I had a working system. An agent that processed the AWS RSS feed several times a day, filtered relevant news with Claude, and generated posts for LinkedIn and X. I'd built it, deployed it, and monitored its logs with some satisfaction. And yet, there was something I disliked every time I opened the code: three methods whose sole purpose was to distrust the LLM. _extract_json_from_text . _validate_analysis_structure . _create_fallback_analysis . Together they added up to more than 130 lines. All that code existed to handle a single possibility: that the model would respond with something different from what I'd asked for. That it would include an apology before the JSON. That it would forget a field. That it would format the output incorrectly. When Amazon announced Bedrock Structured Outputs, I immediately understood what I'd been doing wrong. It wasn't a prompting problem. It was an architecture problem: I had been asking the model to be consistent, when what I needed was to guarantee