Thing is even with XML LLM will fail every now and then.

I've built an agent in both tool calling and by parsing XML

You always need a self correcting loop built in, if you are editing a file with LLM you need provide hints so LLM gets it right the second time or 3rd or n time.

Just by switching to XML you'll not get that.

I used to use XML now i only use it for examples in in system prompt for model to learn. That's all

Agreed - in this project I did a one path sanitation to recover invalid optional / nullable fields or discard invalid objects in nested array.

I know multi path LLM approaches exist: e.g. generating JSON patches

https://github.com/hinthornw/trustcall