Why Your LLM API Gateway Is Critical (and You Don't Have One)
Your LLM integrations are scaling. Without an API gateway, you're building a brittle, unobservable mess. It's not optional for production.
Blog · Topic
LLM Engineering
The engineering around LLM calls: timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, prompts, structured output and latency budgets.
14 posts
The Circuit Breaker Your LLM Integration Is Missing
Your LLM integration has no circuit breaker. That's not a minor gap — it's a reliability time bomb.
The Graceful Degradation Nobody Designed
Your AI system has a happy path and a crash path. The space between them is where real production lives.
The Timeout You Never Set
LLM API calls without explicit timeouts are a production incident waiting to happen. Here's what hangs, why, and how to stop it.
The Cost Spike You Didn't See Coming
Nobody models LLM costs seriously until they get the bill. By then, the architecture is already wrong.
The System Prompt That Grew Without Anyone Noticing
System prompt bloat is one of the slowest ways to degrade your LLM system — and one of the easiest to miss until performance tanks and costs spike.
Tool Calls Are Side Effects. Treat Them That Way.
Agents that call tools are running code with real consequences. Most teams build them like they're not.
The Retry Loop That Ate Your API Quota
Naive retry logic is one of the most common — and most expensive — bugs in LLM production systems. Here's what it looks like and how to fix it.
The Context Window Is Not a Clipboard
Bigger context windows didn't solve the problem of what goes in them. Most production LLM failures aren't model failures — they're context failures.
Structured Output Is Not a Nice-to-Have
If your LLM integration parses free-text responses in production, you don't have a product. You have a fragile prototype waiting to fail.
The Confidence Problem in LLM Outputs
LLMs don't know when they're wrong. Your production system has to.
Your LLM Has a Latency Budget. Do You Know What It Is?
Most teams ship AI features without defining acceptable latency. Then they spend months optimizing the wrong thing.
LLM Versioning: The Problem Nobody Solves Until It's Too Late
Your model changed under your app. Your prompt changed under your users. And nobody noticed until something broke. Fix this before it happens to you.
Treat Your Prompts Like Code. Because They Are.
Prompt management in production isn't a nice-to-have. If you don't version, test, and deploy prompts with the same discipline as code, you're flying blind.