// Topics / LLMs
LLMs
48 entries tagged “LLMs”
- AI Video Applications in Practice
· 4 min
Video AI is practical for scoped workflows. This post covers what works, how to design for reliability, and where human review still matters.
llm
ai
production
Running AI Locally: A Practical Guide for Teams Who Care About Control
· 6 min
Local AI is no longer a hobby project. How to set it up properly: provider abstraction, versioned models, eval harnesses, and a cloud fallback.
llm
development
privacy
AI Docs That Don't Lie to Your Users
· 4 min
Most AI documentation systems retrieve the wrong version, hallucinate details, and never admit uncertainty. Here's how to build one that actually helps.
engineering
ai
llm
Stop Fine-Tuning Models You Haven't Bothered to Prompt Properly
· 4 min
Fine-tuning is the goto move for teams who skipped the basics. Most of the time, better prompts and proper retrieval solve the actual problem.
llm
ai
opinion
Your AI Pipeline Is Just ETL With Extra Steps (And That's Fine)
· 5 min
AI data pipelines are ETL with a retrieval layer bolted on. The discipline is the same as always: detect change, chunk intelligently, keep indexes fresh.
data
ai
infrastructure
MCP in Practice: Building Tool Servers in Go
· 7 min
Model Context Protocol promises to standardize how AI talks to tools. I built an MCP server in Go to see if the promise holds up. Here's what I found.
agents
ai
go
Video Understanding AI: What Actually Works
· 4 min
I pointed a video understanding pipeline at 200 hours of meeting recordings. The results taught me more about pipeline design than about meetings.
llm
ai
data
Reasoning Models in Production: A Practical Guide
· 7 min
Reasoning models are powerful but expensive and slow. Here's how I integrate them in Go services with routing, async patterns, and cost controls that actually work.
llm
production
ai
Picking an AI Model for Production (Late 2024)
· 5 min
There's no best model. There's the model that fits your workload, latency budget, cost constraint, and ops tolerance. Here's how to compare them.
ai
llm
reflection
AI Cost Benchmarking: What Your Bill Actually Tells You
· 4 min
Price-per-token is the least useful number on your AI bill. Real cost benchmarking starts with your workload, not a provider's pricing page.
ai
cost
llm
RAG Retrieval That Actually Works
· 7 min
Most RAG failures are retrieval failures. Hybrid search, smarter chunking, query expansion, and reranking -- measured separately from generation.
llm
go
How I Actually Test LLM Features
· 6 min
LLM outputs are non-deterministic. That doesn't mean you can't test them rigorously. Here's the layered testing approach I use in production.
llm
testing
ai
The Best Model Is the Smallest One That Works
· 3 min
Everyone reaches for GPT-4 by default. Most production tasks don't need it. Small models are faster, cheaper, and often better when the task is well-defined.
llm
ai
performance
Stop Stuffing Your Context Window
· 4 min
Bigger context windows aren't an excuse to stop thinking about what goes into them. Most teams are paying for irrelevant tokens and wondering why quality degrades.
llm
ai
architecture
Function Calling Patterns That Survive Production
· 7 min
Function calling is how LLMs touch real systems. Treat tools like APIs, arguments like untrusted input, and permissions like the model is an intern with root access.
llm
ai
go
Claude 3.5 Sonnet Analysis: Cost, Coding, and Model Routing
· 5 min
Claude 3.5 Sonnet changes model routing math for coding, cost, latency, and production AI workloads.
llm
ai
reflection
Building Voice AI That People Actually Use
· 5 min
Voice AI is ready to ship. The hard parts are latency, interruptions, and knowing when voice is the wrong interface. Here's how I approach it.
llm
ai
go
GPT-4o Changed the Interface, Not the Hard Part
· 4 min
OpenAI shipped a model that sees, hears, and talks back in real time. The demos look magical. The architecture implications are where it gets interesting.
llm
architecture
ai
LLM Structured Output in Go: JSON Schema, Validation, Retries
· 7 min
How to get reliable JSON from LLMs in Go with schemas, validation, repair loops, and typed contracts.
llm
api
go
LLM Prompt Caching in Go: Cut Costs Without Breaking Things
· 6 min
Caching LLM responses is the highest-leverage optimization most teams skip. How I implement it in Go -- keys, invalidation, and safety patterns.
llm
performance
go
Why I Run Multiple Models in Production
· 4 min
Betting on a single model provider is like having a single database with no failover. Here is why multi-model is the only sane production strategy.
ai
architecture
llm
Claude 3 First Impressions: Three Models, One Decision Framework
· 4 min
Anthropic shipped three models instead of one. That is actually the most interesting part of the release.
llm
ai
LLM Evaluation: Stop Shipping on Vibes
· 5 min
Your LLM feature looks great in demos and breaks in production. Here is how to build an evaluation loop that catches regressions before your users do.
ai
llm
testing
Architecting AI-Native Applications (Without the Delusion)
· 7 min
AI-native apps are fundamentally different from a model bolted onto a CRUD app. How I structure them -- with code, layers, and hard-won opinions.
architecture
ai
engineering
Stop Paying OpenAI to Test Your Prompts
· 4 min
Local LLMs are finally good enough for development. Use them for iteration, keep the API bills for production.
llm
engineering
go
AI Engineering Is Its Own Discipline Now
· 4 min
AI engineering is not ML research with a product hat. It is the discipline of making models behave in production -- and it demands its own skill set.
ai
hiring
llm
Multimodal AI: Five Use Cases That Actually Work (and Three That Do Not)
· 5 min
GPT-4V is out and everyone is building vision features. After testing it across real workflows, here is what ships well and what falls apart.
ai
llm
business
Two Weeks With the Assistants API: What I Like, What I Hate
· 4 min
I built three things with the Assistants API. One shipped, one got scrapped, and one taught me where the API's limits really are.
llm
ai
go
OpenAI DevDay Happened and I Have Opinions
· 4 min
OpenAI DevDay was not just a product launch. It was a platform play that changes the build-vs-buy calculus for every team shipping AI features.
llm
ai
architecture
LLM Security: A Field Guide for People Who Ship Things
· 6 min
LLMs bring security failure modes most teams aren't defending against. Prompt injection, data leakage, tool abuse, and cost attacks are exploitable today.
security
llm
ai
AI Technical Debt Is Eating Your Codebase (You Just Cannot See It Yet)
· 4 min
AI features create a new species of technical debt that hides in prompts, data pipelines, and model versions. By the time you notice it, the cleanup bill is brutal.
ai
technical-debt
engineering
Agent Architecture Patterns That Actually Work in Production
· 6 min
Most agent demos are impressive. Most agent production systems are not. Here is what separates the two.
ai
agents
llm
LLM Observability: Your Existing Monitoring Is Not Enough
· 5 min
Traditional monitoring says the service is up. It won't tell you the model started returning garbage last Tuesday. How to actually observe LLM systems.
observability
llm
ai
What I Learned Building AI Features Into a Fintech Product
· 5 min
Building AI features at a fintech taught me the hard part isn't the model: it's defining quality, handling failures, and not shipping a demo as a product.
ai
strategy
business
Your LLM Bill Is Your Own Fault
· 4 min
Everyone's complaining about LLM costs. Almost nobody has done the basics: caching, model routing, or even measuring what they're spending per feature.
ai
cost
llm
Embedding Models Compared: Retrieval Quality, Cost, and Latency
· 6 min
A practical embedding model comparison for retrieval quality, vector size, latency, cost, and self-hosting tradeoffs.
llm
ai
go
Building Semantic Search in Go: From Embeddings to Production
· 7 min
A hands-on walkthrough of building semantic search with Go, OpenAI embeddings, and pgvector -- chunking, hybrid retrieval, and the gotchas I hit.
ai
llm
go
Fine-Tuning vs. Prompting: A Decision Framework
· 4 min
Most teams should exhaust prompting before they even think about fine-tuning. Here's how to decide which lever to pull.
ai
llm
LangChain Is the New ORM: Convenient Until It Is Not
· 4 min
LangChain promises to simplify LLM development. Instead it adds abstraction layers you will fight against the moment your use case gets real.
llm
ai
opinion
RAG Patterns That Actually Work in Production
· 8 min
RAG is the default architecture for grounding LLMs in private data. Here are the patterns that survive real traffic, with Go examples from production systems.
llm
ai
go
Vector Databases: What They Actually Are and When You Need One
· 6 min
A practical guide to vector databases -- what they store, how similarity search works, and the architectural decisions that matter in production.
llm
ai
go
Claude vs GPT: A User's Honest Take
· 3 min
Anthropic's Claude takes a different approach to AI safety. Here is how it compares to GPT in practice, from someone using both daily.
ai
llm
My First Week Building with GPT-4
· 4 min
GPT-4 landed and everything changed. What I learned in the first week of building with it, and the architecture decisions that followed.
ai
llm
architecture
Prompt Engineering Is Not Engineering
· 3 min
The term 'prompt engineering' oversells what is essentially clear writing. It is a useful skill, not a discipline.
ai
llm
opinion
LLM Integration Patterns That Actually Survive Production
· 6 min
Practical patterns for integrating LLMs into real applications -- prompt management, structured outputs, caching, fallbacks, and tool use -- with Go examples.
ai
llm
go
AI in Production Is Just Engineering. Treat It That Way.
· 4 min
ChatGPT changed expectations overnight, but shipping AI features that actually work is an engineering problem, not a model problem.
ai
production
engineering
Five Days With ChatGPT
· 4 min
First impressions of ChatGPT from a working engineer. It is not a search engine, it is not a colleague, and it is definitely not a replacement. But it is something.
ai
llm
developer-experience
Your Video Infrastructure Isn't Ready for What's Coming
· 6 min
Most companies building video calling are making the same architecture mistakes. What I keep seeing, and how to fix it before your SFUs fall over.
llm
infrastructure
architecture