Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
A field report from rolling out retrieval-augmented generation in production, including cache bugs, bad embeddings, and how we fixed them.
We benchmarked six embedding models on the same retrieval task. The results that surprised us, and how we'd pick today.
We cut our monthly LLM bill from $11,200 to $2,300 with seven specific changes. The ones that worked, the ones that didn't, and what we'd do first.
Fine-tuning is rarely the right answer. We've fine-tuned three times in two years; few-shot or RAG was correct for everything else. The decision criteria.
Standard APM doesn't tell you when your LLM-powered features are silently degrading. The signals we track and the dashboards that catch the regressions standard tools miss.
Multi-agent systems are mostly hype. The patterns we've seen actually deliver value, plus the ones we'd avoid until the tooling is more mature.
We have ~40 prompts in production. The patterns that improved quality, the ones that turned out to be folklore, and how we test prompts now.
We tried four quantization techniques on Llama-3 and Mistral models. The quality vs cost trade-offs we found, plus what works for production inference.
We benchmarked four vector databases on the same workload. Each has a place. Here's how we'd pick today.
