MCP and agents
Structured output
A tool result returned as typed data with a declared schema, rather than as prose the model has to parse.
In detail.
A tool that returns a table of numbers with named columns lets the model compute on them. A tool that returns the same numbers inside a sentence forces it to extract them first, which it usually does correctly and occasionally does not.
The gain is largest exactly where the cost of an error is highest: currency amounts, date ranges, and identifiers that will be passed into a later write call.