Introduction: LLMs can generate harmful, biased, or inappropriate content. They can be manipulated through prompt injection, jailbreaks, and adversarial inputs. Production applications need guardrails—safety mechanisms that validate inputs, moderate content, and filter outputs before they reach users. This guide covers practical guardrail implementations: input validation to catch malicious prompts, content moderation using classifiers and LLM-based […]
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Testing LLM Applications: Unit Tests, Integration Tests, and Evaluation
Introduction: Testing LLM applications presents unique challenges compared to traditional software. Outputs are non-deterministic, quality is subjective, and the same input can produce different but equally valid responses. This guide covers practical testing strategies: unit testing with mocked LLM responses, integration testing with real API calls, evaluation frameworks for quality assessment, and regression testing to […]
Read more →RESTful AI API Design: Best Practices for LLM APIs
Designing RESTful APIs for LLMs requires careful consideration. After building 30+ LLM APIs, I’ve learned what works. Here’s the complete guide to RESTful AI API design. Figure 1: RESTful AI API Architecture Why LLM APIs Are Different LLM APIs have unique requirements: Async operations: LLM inference can take seconds or minutes Streaming responses: Need to […]
Read more →Function Calling Deep Dive: Building LLM-Powered Tools and Agents
Introduction: Function calling transforms LLMs from text generators into action-taking agents. Instead of just describing what to do, the model can actually do it—query databases, call APIs, execute code, and interact with external systems. OpenAI’s function calling (now called “tools”) and similar features from Anthropic and others let you define available functions, and the model […]
Read more →LLM Rate Limiting: Maximizing API Throughput Without Getting Throttled
Introduction: LLM APIs have strict rate limits—requests per minute, tokens per minute, and concurrent request limits. Hit these limits and your application grinds to a halt with 429 errors. Effective rate limiting isn’t just about staying under limits; it’s about maximizing throughput while maintaining reliability. This guide covers practical rate limiting patterns: token bucket algorithms […]
Read more →Quantization Methods for LLMs: GPTQ, AWQ, and BitsAndBytes
Last year, I needed to run a 13B parameter model on a 16GB GPU. Full precision required 52GB. After testing GPTQ, AWQ, and BitsAndBytes, I reduced memory to 7GB with minimal accuracy loss. After quantizing 30+ models, I’ve learned which method works best for each scenario. Here’s the complete guide to LLM quantization. Figure 1: […]
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