I’m looking at DeepSeek for a small service that needs machine-readable responses. I don’t need the model to call a function; I just want its final answer to match a JSON shape with required fields and predictable types.

Does the DeepSeek API offer a reliable schema-constrained mode for that, or should I expect to validate and repair the output in my application? I’d be interested in examples from people who use it for structured extraction in production.