Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
You can't improve retrieval you don't measure. The offline eval harness that lets us change embeddings, chunking, and rerankers with confidence instead of vibes — with the metrics that actually predict production quality.
Parsing model output with a regex and a prayer doesn't survive contact with traffic. The validation layers that keep structured LLM output reliable — constrained decoding, schema validation, and the repair loop.
They solve different problems. RAG injects knowledge; fine-tuning changes behavior. The decision criteria, the hybrid pattern, and what we'd do over.
Token caching, model routing, prompt compression, and the boring discipline of measuring. The levers that cut our LLM bill 60% without touching feature scope.
Tracking experiments and shipping models are different problems. The MLOps tooling assumes one solution; production splits them. The patterns we use.
AI agents for incident triage sound great in demos. We've tried it in production. The patterns that earn their keep, the ones that backfire, and where humans still beat agents.
Most LLM eval suites correlate poorly with what real users experience. The eval patterns we run that move with prod metrics — and the ones that lied to us.
Single-provider LLM apps fail when the provider does. Multi-provider routing isn't just resilience — it's also a cost lever. The patterns we run.
Pure vector search misses exact-keyword queries. Pure BM25 misses semantic ones. Combining them with reciprocal rank fusion is the simplest large win in RAG retrieval.
Embedding indexes degrade silently. The signals that catch drift, how often to re-embed, and the operational patterns we built after one quiet quality regression.
Streaming LLM responses is easy until the client disconnects, the model stalls, or the user cancels. The patterns that keep streaming responsive without leaking spend.
When LLMs can call tools that change real state, the design decisions that matter most are about what's gated, what's automatic, and what triggers a human checkpoint.
