The Data Refinery: How JSON Quietly Became the Language AI Agents Speak (opens in new tab)

Every tool call, every structured output, every agent decision travels as JSON. Here is the serialization knowledge that separates the amateur from the architect — now that the stakes have never been higher. A developer ships an AI agent on a Friday. In the demo it's flawless: the model reads a request, calls a tool, returns a clean answer the app renders perfectly. A week later, production dashboards are full of garbage. A date is showing up as raw text. A field that was definitely there is ...