10 Hard-Earned Lessons from a Year of Building with LLMs in Production

1Key Takeaways

• AI Twitter (and LinkedIn, and every tech newsletter) makes LLM engineering look like a solved problem: wire up an API call, add a system prompt, ship it.
• Anyone who's actually taken an LLM feature from prototype to production knows that's about 10% of the job.
• The other 90% is the unglamorous stuff - the failure modes nobody demos, the costs nobody mentions in the launch tweet, the "it worked great until real users touched it" moments.
• Here are ten lessons that took me longer to learn than they….