Lead · Agent Fundamentals
Format correctness makes people let their guard down — that's exactly what makes it most dangerous. A rambling, incoherent piece of free text, a reader spots at a glance; a neatly formatted JSON object holding the exact same hallucination, almost nobody looks twice.
Alex Mercer
·
July 10, 2026
Most Agent developers, when a system first launches, focus first on 'is the output format correct' — missing fields, JSON syntax errors, whether schema validation passes. This is a reasonable first step and a relatively easy problem to solve (through mechanisms like Structured Output, format error rates can be pushed close to zero). But once format reliability is solved, a more concealed,...