LLM Error Handling: Building Resilient AI Applications

Introduction: LLM APIs fail. Rate limits get hit, servers time out, responses get truncated, and models occasionally return garbage. Production applications need robust error handling that gracefully recovers from failures without losing user context or corrupting state. This guide covers practical error handling strategies: detecting and classifying different error types, implementing retry logic with exponential […]

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Streaming Response Patterns: Building Responsive LLM Applications

Introduction: Waiting for complete LLM responses creates poor user experiences. Users stare at loading spinners while models generate hundreds of tokens. Streaming delivers tokens as they’re generated, showing users immediate progress and reducing perceived latency dramatically. But streaming introduces complexity: you need to handle partial responses, buffer tokens for processing, manage connection failures mid-stream, and […]

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LLM Security Best Practices: Protecting AI Applications from Attacks

Introduction: LLM applications face unique security challenges. Prompt injection attacks can hijack model behavior, sensitive data can leak through responses, and malicious outputs can harm users. Traditional security measures don’t fully address these risks—you need LLM-specific defenses. This guide covers practical security strategies: validating and sanitizing inputs, detecting prompt injection attempts, filtering sensitive information from […]

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Embedding Model Selection: Choosing the Right Model for Your AI Application

Introduction: Choosing the right embedding model determines the quality of your semantic search, RAG system, or clustering application. Different models excel at different tasks—some optimize for retrieval accuracy, others for speed, and others for specific domains. The wrong choice means poor results regardless of how well you build everything else. This guide covers practical embedding […]

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LLM Cost Tracking: Visibility and Control for AI Spending

Introduction: LLM costs can spiral out of control without proper tracking. A single runaway feature or inefficient prompt can burn through your budget in hours. Understanding where your tokens go—by user, feature, model, and time—is essential for cost optimization and capacity planning. This guide covers practical cost tracking: metering token usage at the request level, […]

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Function Calling Patterns: Enabling LLMs to Take Real Actions

Introduction: Function calling transforms LLMs from text generators into action-taking agents. Instead of just describing what to do, the model can invoke actual functions with structured arguments. This enables powerful integrations: querying databases, calling APIs, executing code, and orchestrating complex workflows. But function calling requires careful design—poorly defined functions confuse the model, missing validation causes […]

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