Every week we talk to teams sitting on a brilliant LLM prototype that never made it past the demo stage. The gap between prototype and production is not model quality — it is engineering discipline.
Start With the User Journey, Not the Model
Define what success looks like for the human using your feature. Then choose the smallest model and prompt that reliably delivers that outcome. Bigger is not always better.
Guardrails Are Not Optional
Input validation, output filtering, rate limits, and fallback responses belong in v1. Production LLM apps fail gracefully — they do not hallucinate in front of paying customers.
Observability From Day One
Log prompts, latency, token usage, and user feedback. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. We wire tracing into every LLM integration we ship.