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If you're quite confident, you can usually cast the type via `as Output&lt;string&gt;`, or if that doesn't work, `as any as Output&lt;string&gt;`.

A helper library like this one contains type guards like "is.string". You'd need to use that inside an Apply and decide how to handle the else case - throwing an error in the Apply would work.

 <https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sindresorhus/is|https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sindresorhus/is>

I think you'd end up with:

```requireOutput(...).apply(x =&gt; {
  if is.string(x) {
    return x;
  } else { 
    throw new Error("expected a string!")
});```

Thanks <@UFPFMDBTK>, very helpful!

For anyone that stumbles upon this, I also found you can do an await for stack references that aren't secrets. Makes it much easier to handle them since they end as default string types instead of pulumi output strings:

```export = async () =&gt; {
  const pulumiStackReference = new pulumi.StackReference(`otherStack`);
  const myOutput = await pulumiStackReference.requireOutputValue('myOutput')
}```