SOTA LLM Engineering

Purpose

One skill, two modes. The rules/ files define the mid-2026 baseline for engineering LLM-powered software that is measured, grounded, bounded, and observable. In BUILD mode you write LLM features that conform to the rules by default. In AUDIT mode you hunt for violations and report them as severity-rated findings. The rules are the single source of truth for both.

Framing: an LLM call is a non-deterministic, expensive, latency-heavy RPC to a dependency that changes underneath you. Everything here follows from that — you don't ship logic you can't measure (evals), you don't trust output you didn't validate (structured output, grounding), you don't run loops you can't stop (budgets), and you don't deploy what you can't trace (observability).