Fixing JSON Output from GPT: A Pattern That Actually Works

I spent three days debugging why my GPT-4-powered app kept returning malformed JSON. It wasn't a prompt issue. I tried few-shot examples, system messages, even begged the model with 'PLEASE give me valid JSON'. And it still broke in production. This is the story of how I finally got reliable structured output from LLMs — without playing whack-a-mole with edge cases. The Problem: JSON Roulette I was building a small internal tool that extracts meeting notes and turns them into struct...