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System One

Structured outputs

Structured outputs is the existing technique for making a language model emit valid JSON: constrain decoding to a schema so every generated token keeps the output parseable. OpenAI and others ship it in their APIs, and libraries such as Outlines and Instructor do the same over open models.

Mechanically, schema-constrained decoding masks the logits at each step so only tokens the grammar allows can be sampled. The model still generates a token at a time. A JSON object with six fields costs six fields’ worth of sequential decoding, and any confidence figure has to be reconstructed from logprobs afterwards.

A System One model differs at exactly that step. Nothing is generated and then constrained, because the option set you passed in is the answer space, and a calibrated probability over those options comes back as part of the answer. TypeSafe’s public claim is that Jev “Generates all outputs in a single query”.

Almeida’s objection to the older approach, as reported by agentpedia.codes, is that OpenAI-style structured outputs “make models dumber… simply masking logits is insufficient.” No published evaluation backs that up, and no independent benchmark of Jev existed as of 2026-09-18.

The tradeoff runs the other way too. Structured outputs can return free-text fields and arbitrary nesting; Jev returns neither, and its own jaggedness page states that “Jev-1.13 is not trained to generate text.” The comparison is worked through in System One vs LLM, and the generation question in non-autoregressive.

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