How to Put an LLM in Your Product Without Wrecking Your Costs or Your Latency

Short summary

Optimizing LLM features for production means targeting output length first—it's the primary cost and latency driver. Use caching for repeated requests, route simple work to cheaper models, and stream responses for UX perception. Apply standard resilience engineering with timeouts and circuit breakers; treat LLMs as expensive network dependencies requiring proper monitoring and fallback strategies.

• •Output length drives both cost and latency—the highest-leverage optimization
• •Caching and model routing eliminate most duplicate work without quality loss
• •Timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers prevent cascading failures at scale

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.