Tag

q-and-a

109 posts

Jul 11, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you safely let AI agents run unattended to build features, and what safeguards do you put in place?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 10, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best way to specify constraints and rules for AI agents so they stay aligned with your system design?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 9, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the current state of using LLMs for code generation while keeping infrastructure and API costs reasonable?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 8, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How should you structure LLM evaluation and testing in your development pipeline to catch issues before production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 7, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What are practical techniques for reducing hallucinations and improving reliability in production LLM systems?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 6, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you optimize LLM usage costs when building AI-powered coding features?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 5, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best open-source LLM you can run on a 24GB VRAM GPU for production workloads?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 4, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you build a hybrid local and cloud LLM architecture for regulated financial document processing?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 3, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best strategy for controlling costs and enforcing rate limits on LLM API calls in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 2, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you prevent hallucinated tool calls from wasting tokens and breaking production LLM workflows?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jul 1, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What are the practical differences in building real-world AI agent systems versus the simplified examples in documentation?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 30, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Are current AI agents fundamentally limited by their architecture in ways that newer research directions like diffusion LLMs could address?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 29, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What skills and mindsets distinguish someone doing prompt engineering from someone building actual software systems with LLMs?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 28, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you evaluate whether an LLM-based approach is worth the engineering overhead compared to traditional solutions?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 27, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What workflow and practices actually worked when building a large-scale AI-assisted application (126K lines of code)?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 26, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What are the security and governance concerns with giving AI agents direct database access, and how does it differ from traditional BI tool problems?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 25, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you handle prompt fatigue and prevent LLMs from producing lazy or low-effort outputs in production systems?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 24, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — When should you replace a flat fact store with a graph database in an AI agent, and what are the implementation tradeoffs?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 23, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What makes vibe coding fail compared to structured approaches to LLM development?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 22, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Does implementing energy-based models for enterprise AI security justify the complexity?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 21, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Are you optimizing content for AI search engines versus traditional SEO?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 20, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best approach to tracing and debugging LLM calls in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 19, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How should AI agents discover and order real-world services?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 18, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do teams prevent duplicate LLM API calls and token waste?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 17, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What is the control plane for local AI agents?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 16, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are you orchestrating multi-agent AI workflows in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 15, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is traditional machine learning still worth learning and building with, or should you focus entirely on LLMs?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 14, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What deterministic guarantees do you need from an LLM system for compliance-heavy enterprise use cases?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 13, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you structure your LLM training infrastructure to avoid getting locked into a single provider or model?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 12, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — When should you use prompt engineering and when do you actually need fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented generation?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 11, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What concrete guardrails and constraints do you need to put on LLM agents before deploying them to production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 10, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How is AI-assisted coding actually changing your development workflow and productivity in a real codebase?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 9, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the practical difference between using an AI agent for backend automation versus building traditional scheduled jobs or APIs?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 8, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you know what data your AI coding agent is sending to the cloud, and what should you audit for?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 7, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — When should you use traditional ML (tabular models, gradient boosting) instead of jumping straight to LLMs for a new feature?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 6, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you architect systems where AI agents can safely execute code or access tools without human review on every action?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 5, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What are the actual best practices for learning to build effective multi-step AI agents beyond toy examples?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 4, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — When building AI agents, how do you decide between deterministic state machines and freeform LLM reasoning?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 3, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's a concrete pattern for adding governance and determinism to AI pipelines that need compliance or audit trails?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 2, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you structure LLM applications to prevent hallucinations when the model is confident but factually wrong?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Jun 1, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the practical difference between building with Claude, ChatGPT, and open-source models when you need production reliability?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 31, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you reliably evaluate AI agent behavior in production when testing in development doesn't catch all failure modes?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 30, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's your strategy for sourcing and licensing data for training custom AI models?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 29, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What common issues are you hitting with LLM gateways and API management in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 28, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you give local LLMs persistent context without bloating prompts or losing information?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 27, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Should you use regex or other methods to enforce security constraints on LLM agent outputs?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 26, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What patterns work best for aggregating results when retrieval-augmented generation approaches fail in agentic systems?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 25, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you handle data isolation and prevent information leakage in RAG systems serving multiple tenants?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 24, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best approach for real-time, local text-to-speech when building live voice interaction features?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 23, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you prevent AI agents from taking unintended actions when they have access to external tools and APIs?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 22, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What are developers actually building with AI coding agents right now?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 21, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Why does Codex work better than Claude Code for production monoliths?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 20, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What practical tips do power users have for working effectively with AI agents?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 19, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Are there any AI agent sandboxes worth evaluating right now?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 18, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How much are you actually spending on AI coding at work?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 17, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best way to replace RAG pipelines with a filesystem interface for AI agents?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 16, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Why don't AI coding tools like REST?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 15, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you prevent retry cascades in LLM systems?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 14, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Why should you add relationships and structure to your AI context instead of using naive RAG?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 13, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best approach for handling OCR and document parsing in a RAG pipeline?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 12, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are you using multi-agent AI systems effectively in your daily workflow?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 11, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Should you use agentic search or RAG for retrieval, and what's the tradeoff in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 10, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are you preventing runaway LLM workflows and token costs in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 9, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are you structuring context and prompts for AI coding agents to get reliable results?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 8, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What breaks when you run AI agents unsupervised in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 7, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are you using LLMs in production and what unexpected issues have you hit?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 6, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Are you using finetuning for LLM agents in production, and if so, what trade-offs did you encounter versus using base models with prompt engineering?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 4, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How should you structure memory and context for AI agents so they can learn from past tasks without growing unbounded token usage?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 3, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What monitoring and safeguards do you need in place to control AI agents that take real actions in production systems?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 2, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you keep AI coding agents aligned with your team's codebase standards, style guides, and architectural decisions?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
May 1, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Should you give AI agents access to API keys and private credentials, and if so, what isolation strategies actually work?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 30, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the best way to set cost limits and prevent AI agents from burning through your API budget on failed or inefficient tasks?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 29, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you prevent AI agents from accidentally introducing vulnerable dependencies or malicious code when they autonomously modify your codebase?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 27, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's your strategy for testing and evaluating LLM outputs in production now that Promptfoo was acquired?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 26, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Has anyone successfully fine-tuned LLMs for production use and what was the ROI?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 25, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is operational memory a missing layer in AI agent architecture?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 24, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What hiring criteria should you use when your team is heavily using AI-assisted coding?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 23, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Who is actually getting measurable value from AI agents in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 22, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you know if AI agents will choose your tool?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 21, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Has anyone deployed LLMs to production and what were the biggest operational challenges?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 20, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are you extracting the best performance out of your RAG pipeline?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 19, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is anyone using function calling with LLMs in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 18, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Best LLM stack for Q&A over internal PDFs?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 17, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What tools are you using for AI evals, and why does everything feel half-baked?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 16, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is synthetic data generation practical outside academia?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 14, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Are we pretending RAG is ready, when it's barely out of demo phase?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 13, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Why don't we have a functional DSL for data+embedding+API pipelines?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 12, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Why are so many companies rolling out their own AI/LLM agent sandboxing solution?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 11, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 10, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Can you personalize an LLM by fine-tuning it on conversation history, or is that the wrong approach?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 9, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Who is actually getting real business value from AI agents right now, and how?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 8, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is fine-tuning LLMs actually worth it, or is prompt engineering and RAG always the better path?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 7, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is fine-tuning the right approach when you want a model to reliably remember your codebase or company-specific data?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 6, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What kinds of tasks are AI agents actually reliable at in production today?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 5, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is RAG an antipattern for AI agents, or is it still the right default approach?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 4, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you actually monitor AI agents in production when there's no standard playbook yet?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 3, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — We're using an LLM to extract structured data from messy PDFs. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes it misses fields or invents data. How do I know if the problem is the model, my prompt, or the PDF quality itself?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 2, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — We're getting inconsistent outputs from the same prompt with GPT-5.4. Temperature is locked at 0. What's actually going on?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Apr 1, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — I'm using Claude Opus 4.6 for a customer-facing summarization task. Should I batch requests during off-peak hours to save money, or just call the API in real-time?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 31, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do I know when to stop prompt engineering and just upgrade my model?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 30, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Is it better to improve the harness around the LLM or wait for a better model?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 29, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Should I A/B test my LLM prompts in production or is that overkill?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 28, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — What's the hardest part of building AI agents that actually work?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 27, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do you actually test LLM apps beyond vibe checks?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 26, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Why is AI agent reliability barely improving despite 18 months of model upgrades?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 25, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are people safely reusing cached LLM answers in production RAG systems?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 24, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — Do structured outputs from LLMs create false confidence that the response is actually correct?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 23, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How are you handling LLM API costs in production without sacrificing quality?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai
Mar 22, 2026 Office Hours

Office Hours — How do I actually know if my LLM is hallucinating in production?

A daily developer question about AI/LLMs, answered with a direct, opinionated take.

office-hours q-and-a practical-ai

Office Hours — How do you safely let AI agents run unattended to build features, and what safeguards do you put in place?

Office Hours — What's the best way to specify constraints and rules for AI agents so they stay aligned with your system design?

Office Hours — What's the current state of using LLMs for code generation while keeping infrastructure and API costs reasonable?

Office Hours — How should you structure LLM evaluation and testing in your development pipeline to catch issues before production?

Office Hours — What are practical techniques for reducing hallucinations and improving reliability in production LLM systems?

Office Hours — How do you optimize LLM usage costs when building AI-powered coding features?

Office Hours — What's the best open-source LLM you can run on a 24GB VRAM GPU for production workloads?

Office Hours — How do you build a hybrid local and cloud LLM architecture for regulated financial document processing?

Office Hours — What's the best strategy for controlling costs and enforcing rate limits on LLM API calls in production?

Office Hours — How do you prevent hallucinated tool calls from wasting tokens and breaking production LLM workflows?

Office Hours — What are the practical differences in building real-world AI agent systems versus the simplified examples in documentation?

Office Hours — Are current AI agents fundamentally limited by their architecture in ways that newer research directions like diffusion LLMs could address?

Office Hours — What skills and mindsets distinguish someone doing prompt engineering from someone building actual software systems with LLMs?

Office Hours — How do you evaluate whether an LLM-based approach is worth the engineering overhead compared to traditional solutions?

Office Hours — What workflow and practices actually worked when building a large-scale AI-assisted application (126K lines of code)?

Office Hours — What are the security and governance concerns with giving AI agents direct database access, and how does it differ from traditional BI tool problems?

Office Hours — How do you handle prompt fatigue and prevent LLMs from producing lazy or low-effort outputs in production systems?

Office Hours — When should you replace a flat fact store with a graph database in an AI agent, and what are the implementation tradeoffs?

Office Hours — What makes vibe coding fail compared to structured approaches to LLM development?

Office Hours — Does implementing energy-based models for enterprise AI security justify the complexity?

Office Hours — Are you optimizing content for AI search engines versus traditional SEO?

Office Hours — What's the best approach to tracing and debugging LLM calls in production?

Office Hours — How should AI agents discover and order real-world services?

Office Hours — How do teams prevent duplicate LLM API calls and token waste?

Office Hours — What is the control plane for local AI agents?

Office Hours — How are you orchestrating multi-agent AI workflows in production?

Office Hours — Is traditional machine learning still worth learning and building with, or should you focus entirely on LLMs?

Office Hours — What deterministic guarantees do you need from an LLM system for compliance-heavy enterprise use cases?

Office Hours — How do you structure your LLM training infrastructure to avoid getting locked into a single provider or model?

Office Hours — When should you use prompt engineering and when do you actually need fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented generation?

Office Hours — What concrete guardrails and constraints do you need to put on LLM agents before deploying them to production?

Office Hours — How is AI-assisted coding actually changing your development workflow and productivity in a real codebase?

Office Hours — What's the practical difference between using an AI agent for backend automation versus building traditional scheduled jobs or APIs?

Office Hours — How do you know what data your AI coding agent is sending to the cloud, and what should you audit for?

Office Hours — When should you use traditional ML (tabular models, gradient boosting) instead of jumping straight to LLMs for a new feature?

Office Hours — How do you architect systems where AI agents can safely execute code or access tools without human review on every action?

Office Hours — What are the actual best practices for learning to build effective multi-step AI agents beyond toy examples?

Office Hours — When building AI agents, how do you decide between deterministic state machines and freeform LLM reasoning?

Office Hours — What's a concrete pattern for adding governance and determinism to AI pipelines that need compliance or audit trails?

Office Hours — How do you structure LLM applications to prevent hallucinations when the model is confident but factually wrong?

Office Hours — What's the practical difference between building with Claude, ChatGPT, and open-source models when you need production reliability?

Office Hours — How do you reliably evaluate AI agent behavior in production when testing in development doesn't catch all failure modes?

Office Hours — What's your strategy for sourcing and licensing data for training custom AI models?

Office Hours — What common issues are you hitting with LLM gateways and API management in production?

Office Hours — How do you give local LLMs persistent context without bloating prompts or losing information?

Office Hours — Should you use regex or other methods to enforce security constraints on LLM agent outputs?

Office Hours — What patterns work best for aggregating results when retrieval-augmented generation approaches fail in agentic systems?

Office Hours — How do you handle data isolation and prevent information leakage in RAG systems serving multiple tenants?

Office Hours — What's the best approach for real-time, local text-to-speech when building live voice interaction features?

Office Hours — How do you prevent AI agents from taking unintended actions when they have access to external tools and APIs?

Office Hours — What are developers actually building with AI coding agents right now?

Office Hours — Why does Codex work better than Claude Code for production monoliths?

Office Hours — What practical tips do power users have for working effectively with AI agents?

Office Hours — Are there any AI agent sandboxes worth evaluating right now?

Office Hours — How much are you actually spending on AI coding at work?

Office Hours — What's the best way to replace RAG pipelines with a filesystem interface for AI agents?

Office Hours — Why don't AI coding tools like REST?

Office Hours — How do you prevent retry cascades in LLM systems?

Office Hours — Why should you add relationships and structure to your AI context instead of using naive RAG?

Office Hours — What's the best approach for handling OCR and document parsing in a RAG pipeline?

Office Hours — How are you using multi-agent AI systems effectively in your daily workflow?

Office Hours — Should you use agentic search or RAG for retrieval, and what's the tradeoff in production?

Office Hours — How are you preventing runaway LLM workflows and token costs in production?

Office Hours — How are you structuring context and prompts for AI coding agents to get reliable results?

Office Hours — What breaks when you run AI agents unsupervised in production?

Office Hours — How are you using LLMs in production and what unexpected issues have you hit?

Office Hours — Are you using finetuning for LLM agents in production, and if so, what trade-offs did you encounter versus using base models with prompt engineering?

Office Hours — How should you structure memory and context for AI agents so they can learn from past tasks without growing unbounded token usage?

Office Hours — What monitoring and safeguards do you need in place to control AI agents that take real actions in production systems?

Office Hours — How do you keep AI coding agents aligned with your team's codebase standards, style guides, and architectural decisions?

Office Hours — Should you give AI agents access to API keys and private credentials, and if so, what isolation strategies actually work?

Office Hours — What's the best way to set cost limits and prevent AI agents from burning through your API budget on failed or inefficient tasks?

Office Hours — How do you prevent AI agents from accidentally introducing vulnerable dependencies or malicious code when they autonomously modify your codebase?

Office Hours — What's your strategy for testing and evaluating LLM outputs in production now that Promptfoo was acquired?

Office Hours — Has anyone successfully fine-tuned LLMs for production use and what was the ROI?

Office Hours — Is operational memory a missing layer in AI agent architecture?

Office Hours — What hiring criteria should you use when your team is heavily using AI-assisted coding?

Office Hours — Who is actually getting measurable value from AI agents in production?

Office Hours — How do you know if AI agents will choose your tool?

Office Hours — Has anyone deployed LLMs to production and what were the biggest operational challenges?