Introduction: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting dramatically improves LLM performance on complex reasoning tasks. Instead of asking for a direct answer, you prompt the model to show its reasoning step by step. This simple technique can boost accuracy on math problems from 17% to 78%, and similar gains appear across logical reasoning, code generation, and multi-step analysis.… Continue reading
Category: Artificial Intelligence(AI)
Tool Use Patterns: Building LLM Agents That Can Take Action
Introduction: Tool use transforms LLMs from text generators into capable agents that can search the web, query databases, execute code, and interact with APIs. But implementing tool use well is tricky—models hallucinate tool calls, pass invalid arguments, and struggle with multi-step tool chains. The difference between a demo and production system lies in robust tool… Continue reading
Retrieval Augmented Generation Patterns: Building RAG Systems That Actually Work
Introduction: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM responses in your actual data, reducing hallucinations and enabling knowledge that wasn’t in the training set. But naive RAG—embed documents, retrieve top-k, stuff into prompt—often disappoints. Retrieval misses relevant documents, context windows overflow, and the model ignores important information buried in long contexts. This guide covers advanced RAG… Continue reading
LLM Output Parsing: Extracting Structured Data from Free-Form Text
Introduction: LLMs generate text, but applications need structured data—JSON objects, lists, specific formats. The gap between free-form text and usable data structures is where output parsing comes in. Naive approaches using regex or string splitting break constantly as models vary their output format. Robust parsing requires multiple strategies: format instructions that guide the model, extraction… Continue reading
Prompt Compression: Fitting More Context into Your Token Budget
Introduction: Context windows are precious real estate. Every token you spend on context is a token you can’t use for output or additional information. Long prompts hit token limits, increase latency, and cost more money. Prompt compression techniques help you fit more information into less space without losing the signal that matters. This guide covers… Continue reading
Multi-Modal LLM Integration: Building Applications with Vision Capabilities
Introduction: Modern LLMs understand more than text. GPT-4V, Claude 3, and Gemini can process images alongside text, enabling applications that reason across modalities. Building multi-modal applications requires handling image encoding, managing mixed-content prompts, and designing interactions that leverage visual understanding. This guide covers practical patterns for integrating vision capabilities: encoding images for API calls, building… Continue reading
LLM Evaluation Metrics: Measuring Quality Beyond Human Intuition
Introduction: How do you know if your LLM application is working well? Subjective assessment doesn’t scale, and traditional NLP metrics often miss what matters for generative AI. Effective evaluation requires multiple approaches: reference-based metrics that compare against gold standards, semantic similarity that measures meaning preservation, and LLM-as-judge techniques that leverage AI to assess AI. This… Continue reading
Conversation History Management: Building Memory for Multi-Turn AI Applications
Introduction: Chatbots and conversational AI need memory. Without conversation history, every message exists in isolation—the model can’t reference what was said before, follow up on previous topics, or maintain coherent multi-turn dialogues. But history management is tricky: context windows are limited, old messages may be irrelevant, and naive approaches quickly hit token limits. This guide… Continue reading
Semantic Caching: Reducing LLM Costs with Meaning-Based Query Matching
Introduction: LLM API calls are expensive and slow. When users ask similar questions, you’re paying for the same computation repeatedly. Traditional caching doesn’t help because queries are rarely identical—”What’s the weather?” and “Tell me the weather” are different strings but should return the same cached response. Semantic caching solves this by matching queries based on… Continue reading
LLM Request Batching: Maximizing Throughput with Parallel Processing
Introduction: Processing LLM requests one at a time is inefficient. When you have multiple independent requests, sequential processing wastes time waiting for each response before starting the next. Batching groups requests together for parallel processing, dramatically improving throughput. But batching LLM requests isn’t straightforward—you need to handle rate limits, manage concurrent connections, deal with partial… Continue reading