LLM Engineering - Lifecycle Skill

Modern Best Practices: treat the model as a versioned component with contracts, eval gates, rollout controls, cost budgets, and explicit fallback paths. Prefer stable decision criteria over static "best model" lists, and verify volatile provider facts against current official docs before recommending a stack.

This skill is the umbrella skill for deciding how to build, adapt, evaluate, migrate, and operate LLM systems.

Use this skill for architecture and lifecycle decisions. Use sibling skills for implementation depth.

No theory. No generic AI history. Focus on operational choices, tradeoffs, checklists, and reusable templates.

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