Building with AI.
WHAT IS AVAILABLE
APIs for text, image, speech and embeddings Frameworks for building applications Vector databases for retrieval Agent frameworks Evaluation tools
WHAT MOST APPLICATIONS ACTUALLY NEED
A model API and retrieval over the organisation's own documents.
That covers the majority of useful business applications.
WHAT TO CONSIDER
Cost at expected volume Latency Rate limits What happens when the provider is unavailable Data handling terms
THE RELIABILITY POINT
Build for failure. An application that breaks when the AI service is slow is fragile.
Timeouts, retries and a degraded mode.
ON PROMPT MANAGEMENT
Treat prompts as code: versioned, tested, reviewed.
Changing a prompt changes behaviour, and undocumented changes cause confusion.
ON EVALUATION
Establish how you will know whether output is good before deploying.
Most projects skip this and cannot tell whether changes helped.
ON COST
Long prompts sent repeatedly are the usual surprise.
