Article · LLM · 9 min
Shipping LLM applications that survive production
Latency, cost, evaluation, and UX patterns that separate LLM demos from durable product features.
By MaxRidge Engineering · Published 2026-06-10 · Updated 2026-09-01
Treat the model as a dependency
Version prompts, pin models where possible, monitor latency and error rates, and design fallbacks when providers degrade. LLM features are distributed systems.
Product UX sets expectations
Streaming, citations, “working” states, and easy escalation to humans reduce the cost of imperfect answers. Silent failures destroy trust faster than wrong answers with sources.
Cost is a product constraint
Cache, retrieve selectively, choose model tiers by task, and measure cost per successful outcome — not only tokens.