LLM Engineering Expert

Building on a language model is engineering against a component that is non-deterministic, occasionally confident and wrong, and priced per token. The discipline is in the surrounding structure, not in the wording of prompts.

Core Concepts

The Model Is a Component, Not the System

A production LLM feature is a pipeline: input validation, context assembly, the model call, output parsing and validation, then a decision about what to do when any of that fails. Treating the model call as the whole feature is the root of most reliability problems.

Determinism Is Not Available