Category: Technology Engineering

Introduction: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the go-to architecture for building LLM applications that need access to private or current information. By retrieving relevant documents and including them in the prompt, RAG grounds LLM responses in factual content, reducing hallucinations and enabling knowledge that wasn’t in the training data. But naive RAG implementations often disappoint—the […]

Introduction: LLM applications face unique security challenges—prompt injection, data leakage, jailbreaking, and harmful content generation. Traditional security measures don’t address these AI-specific threats. This guide covers defensive techniques for production LLM systems: input sanitization, prompt injection detection, output filtering, rate limiting, content moderation, and audit logging. These patterns help you build LLM applications that are […]

Introduction: Embeddings are the foundation of semantic search, RAG systems, and similarity-based applications. Choosing the right embedding model and strategy significantly impacts retrieval quality, latency, and cost. Different models excel at different tasks—some optimize for semantic similarity, others for retrieval, and some for specific domains. This guide covers practical embedding strategies: model selection based on […]

Introduction: Getting LLMs to return structured data instead of free-form text is essential for building reliable applications. Whether you need JSON for API responses, typed objects for downstream processing, or specific formats for data extraction, structured output techniques ensure consistency and parseability. This guide covers the major approaches: JSON mode, function calling, the Instructor library, […]

Introduction: LLM applications are notoriously hard to test. Outputs are non-deterministic, “correct” is often subjective, and traditional unit tests don’t apply. Yet shipping untested LLM features is risky—prompt changes can break functionality, model updates can degrade quality, and edge cases can embarrass your product. This guide covers practical testing strategies: building evaluation datasets, implementing automated […]

Introduction: Waiting 10-30 seconds for an LLM response feels like an eternity. Streaming changes everything—users see tokens appear in real-time, creating the illusion of instant response even when generation takes just as long. Beyond UX, streaming enables early termination (stop generating when you have enough), progressive processing (start working with partial responses), and better error […]