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The AI Tech Lead Path
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0713 min read · 170 XP

LLMOps & production

Ship, watch, roll back — the AI gateway is your paved road.

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Getting an AI feature to a demo is easy; running it reliably is the job. LLMOps is the discipline of deploying, versioning, observing and governing AI in production — and the AI gateway is the single highest-leverage platform thing you can champion.

Key ideas

  1. 1

    Version everything: prompts, models, retrieval configs and tools — so you can deploy, compare and roll back deliberately.

  2. 2

    Observe in production: trace every request (tokens, latency, cost, tool calls), watch quality drift, and capture user feedback for your eval sets.

  3. 3

    Build an AI gateway: one governed path for all LLM calls — routing, model allow-list, rate limits, cost caps, logging, PII redaction, data-residency.

  4. 4

    Roll out safely: canary/A-B prompt & model changes; have a kill switch and fallbacks.

  5. 5

    Close the loop: production signals feed evals, which gate the next change. Ops and evals are two halves of one system.

The AI gateway (paved road)

  • Every team's LLM call goes through one governed proxy → consistent logging, cost control and safety.
  • Central place to enforce model allow-lists, redact PII, and pin data residency (key for an EU insurer).
  • Makes the compliant path the easy path — adoption follows defaults.

Operate it

  • Dashboards for quality, cost, latency and abuse; alerts on spikes/drift.
  • Prompt/model registry with versions and rollback.
  • Feedback capture → labeled data → eval sets → CI gate.

Watch

Observability for LLMsPhillip Carter · LLMs in Prod
Traceability & observability in multi-step LLM systemsLangfuse

Do the work

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Test yourself

Question 1 / 3

What makes an AI gateway the highest-leverage platform investment?

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