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Folarin Akinloye
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Production
45 articles
01
AI System Design
When Building Gets Cheap, Judgment Gets Expensive
Eight moves for shaping an AI product before the first line of code.
August 3, 2026
20 min
August 3, 2026
20 min
02
Agentic AI
A Skill Is a Dependency That Runs Code
An Agent Skill is not a prompt template. It carries injectable instructions and executable scripts, so treat it like any package you install.
August 2, 2026
8 min
August 2, 2026
8 min
03
From Demo to Product · Part 12
Designing UX for a Confidently-Wrong Intern
Traditional UX assumes the system is correct and fast. An AI feature is neither guaranteed. Design for that.
August 2, 2026
7 min
August 2, 2026
7 min
04
From Demo to Product · Part 11
The Reference Architecture for a Production AI App
The model call is one box out of ten. The other nine are the engineering.
August 2, 2026
11 min
August 2, 2026
11 min
05
From Demo to Product · Part 10
Who Owns Quality: The Benevolent Dictator and AI Incident Response
On an AI product, quality is a judgment call that needs one owner, and an incident whose postmortem output is a new eval example
August 2, 2026
9 min
August 2, 2026
9 min
06
From Demo to Product · Part 9
Detect, Contain, Monitor: The Risks That Sink AI Products
You do not eliminate AI-product risk. You bound the blast radius and watch the rate.
August 2, 2026
7 min
August 2, 2026
7 min
07
From Demo to Product · Part 8
The Unit Economics of an AI Product
Every request costs real money. Why the unit is cost per task, not per call, and how to keep it profitable.
August 2, 2026
8 min
August 2, 2026
8 min
08
From Demo to Product · Part 7
LLMOps and the Data Flywheel
Launch is the start of the work. How you operate an AI product, and how production usage compounds into a moat.
August 2, 2026
8 min
August 2, 2026
8 min
09
From Demo to Product · Part 6
Ship on Containment, Not Perfection
How to expose a non-deterministic feature to real users safely, without waiting for a flawlessness that never comes
August 2, 2026
12 min
August 2, 2026
12 min
10
From Demo to Product · Part 5
Treat the Model as a Flaky, Expensive Dependency
The vendor changes pricing, retires models, and swaps tokenizers under your live product. Wrap it accordingly.
July 25, 2026
5 min
July 25, 2026
5 min
11
From Demo to Product · Part 4
Does Your Problem Even Need an LLM?
The fit gate to run before you build, and what to do when the answer is no
July 25, 2026
5 min
July 25, 2026
5 min
12
From Demo to Product · Part 3
Evals Are the Product Discipline (and Writing Them First Backfires)
Why eval-driven development done like TDD fails, and what error-analysis-first evaluation looks like instead
July 25, 2026
6 min
July 25, 2026
6 min
13
From Demo to Product · Part 2
AI Is Not a Moat
The model is electricity, not the factory. What actually makes an AI product defensible.
July 25, 2026
6 min
July 25, 2026
6 min
14
From Demo to Product · Part 1
The Afternoon and the Quarter
Why an AI demo takes an afternoon and an AI product takes a quarter, and what lives in the gap
July 25, 2026
5 min
July 25, 2026
5 min
15
Agentic AI
What Is AgentOps? Operating AI Agents in Production
How MLOps and LLMOps extend to autonomous, multi-step agents
July 12, 2026
6 min
July 12, 2026
6 min
16
AI Infrastructure
What Is OpenTelemetry, and Why It Matters for Agent Observability
The vendor-neutral standard your agent traces should be built on
July 12, 2026
6 min
July 12, 2026
6 min
17
AI Infrastructure
Tracing in Agent Observability: What It Is and Why It Matters
Traces, spans, and why a readable trace is the fastest way to debug a misbehaving agent
July 12, 2026
7 min
July 12, 2026
7 min
18
LLM Integration
A Field Guide to Model-Specific Prompting
How prompting actually differs across Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, and Mistral, and what transfers
July 3, 2026
5 min
July 3, 2026
5 min
19
LLM Integration
A Real Prompt Engineering Case Study: 65.6 to 91.7 F1 on Job Classification
What a production classification system teaches about which prompt tweaks actually move the needle
July 3, 2026
4 min
July 3, 2026
4 min
20
LLM Integration
Generating Code with Prompts: The Fundamentals Still Matter
Comments to code, SQL from schemas, and the verification habit that separates working code from plausible code
July 3, 2026
6 min
July 3, 2026
6 min
21
LLM Integration
Adversarial Prompting: Injection, Leaking, and Jailbreaking
The three attacks that break LLM apps, and the defences that actually hold up
July 2, 2026
8 min
July 2, 2026
8 min
22
Prompt Engineering, Properly · Part 14
Prompting Reasoning Models Is Almost the Opposite of Prompting Chat Models
Why the step-by-step prompts you learned in this series can hurt an o3 or Claude with thinking on
July 1, 2026
7 min
July 1, 2026
7 min
23
LLM Integration
Directional Stimulus Prompting: Train a Tiny Model to Whisper Hints to a Big One
A small tuneable policy model generates hints that steer a frozen black-box LLM, no access to its weights required
July 1, 2026
5 min
July 1, 2026
5 min
24
Prompt Engineering, Properly · Part 3
The Anatomy of a Good Prompt
Instruction, context, input, and output indicator, plus the design habits that make them work
June 29, 2026
7 min
June 29, 2026
7 min
25
Prompt Engineering, Properly · Part 2
The Settings That Change Your Output
Temperature, top_p, max tokens, stop sequences, and the penalties, and when to touch each
June 29, 2026
6 min
June 29, 2026
6 min
26
Agentic AI
@Claude in Your Slack: What Claude Tag Actually Changes
Anthropic put an agent in the channel where the work already happens. Here is why that matters more than the model behind it.
June 25, 2026
7 min
June 25, 2026
7 min
27
AI Infrastructure
Monitoring Model Deprecation in Production
The model you pinned will be switched off one day, probably with less notice than you would like. Here is how to find out from CI instead of from your users.
June 24, 2026
16 min
June 24, 2026
16 min
28
AI Infrastructure
Observability for LLM Apps: What to Log, What to Alert On
Your 500s and latency graphs will look fine while the product quietly gives wrong answers. LLM observability is about catching the failures that do not throw.
June 24, 2026
7 min
June 24, 2026
7 min
29
Agentic AI
Graph, State Machine, or Plain Loop: How to Structure an Agent
Most agents start as a while loop and should stay that way. Here is how to know when you have actually outgrown it.
June 24, 2026
8 min
June 24, 2026
8 min
30
AI Infrastructure
Caching Agent Tool Calls (Not Just Prompts)
Prompt caching saves you tokens. Caching tool calls saves you the slow, flaky, expensive thing the tool actually does.
June 24, 2026
9 min
June 24, 2026
9 min
31
RAG
Building a Multi-Tenant RAG System: Isolation, Per-Tenant Indexes, and the Leaks Nobody Plans For
The day one customer retrieves another customer's documents, it is over. Here is how to make sure that never happens.
June 24, 2026
9 min
June 24, 2026
9 min
32
AI Infrastructure
Five Projects to Actually Master AI Engineering (for Experienced Engineers)
Skip the toy chatbots. Build the five systems that teach the hard parts: retrieval, agents, evals, cost, and reliability.
June 23, 2026
7 min
June 23, 2026
7 min
33
Building with DeepAgents · Part 5
Human-in-the-Loop in DeepAgents: Approve Before It Acts
Why some tool calls need a person, and how to gate them with interruptOn, decisions, and a checkpointer
June 23, 2026
11 min
June 23, 2026
11 min
34
Building with DeepAgents · Part 3
Memory in DeepAgents: How Agents Learn Across Conversations
Filesystem-backed memory, user versus agent scope, and background consolidation, with the TypeScript to wire each one
June 23, 2026
9 min
June 23, 2026
9 min
35
LLM Integration
Prompt Caching for LLM Apps: What It Is and When It Pays Off
How providers cache your prompt prefix, the real discounts, and the prompt structure that decides whether you save anything
June 22, 2026
6 min
June 22, 2026
6 min
36
Agentic AI
LangGraph State, Checkpointing, and Persistence Explained
How a graph remembers: state channels, checkpointers, threads, and the time travel you get for free
June 22, 2026
7 min
June 22, 2026
7 min
37
LLM Integration
Cutting LLM Cost and Latency Without Wrecking Quality
Measure first, then reach for caching, routing, smaller models, and the structural fixes that actually move the numbers
June 22, 2026
7 min
June 22, 2026
7 min
38
Agentic AI
Guardrails and Safety for Agents in Production
Defense in depth for agents: input rails, output checks, tool limits, and the injection problem that will not fully go away
June 22, 2026
7 min
June 22, 2026
7 min
39
LLM Integration
Streaming LLM Responses End to End: Backend to UI
Why SSE won, how the token stream flows from the provider to the browser, and where it breaks
June 22, 2026
9 min
June 22, 2026
9 min
40
AI Infrastructure
How I Learn to Build Production AI Systems by Dissecting Open Source
There are no good production-grade courses, so I turn the codebases real teams run into my curriculum
June 22, 2026
7 min
June 22, 2026
7 min
41
Agentic AI in Practice · Part 7
Agent Memory: Short-Term vs Long-Term, and How to Wire It Up
Threads are short-term memory. Stores are long-term memory. Most agent memory bugs come from confusing the two.
June 20, 2026
7 min
June 20, 2026
7 min
42
LLM Integration
Structured Outputs and Function Calling, In Depth
How to make an LLM return data that always fits your schema, and how function calling is the same idea wearing a different hat
June 20, 2026
7 min
June 20, 2026
7 min
43
Production RAG · Part 4
Choosing a Vector Database in 2026: pgvector vs Pinecone vs Qdrant vs Weaviate
Most teams should start with pgvector and only move when they have a real reason. Here is how to know when that day comes.
June 20, 2026
6 min
June 20, 2026
6 min
44
Production RAG · Part 2
Reranking in RAG: Cross-Encoders and When They Are Worth the Latency
A reranker can rescue a mediocre retriever or waste 200ms on an already-correct answer. Knowing which is the whole skill.
June 20, 2026
5 min
June 20, 2026
5 min
45
Production RAG · Part 1
Chunking Strategies for RAG: Fixed, Recursive, Semantic, and How to Choose
Why recursive splitting is the right default, and the few cases where you should reach for something fancier
June 20, 2026
6 min
June 20, 2026
6 min