Introduction: LLMs generate text, but applications need structured data. Parsing LLM output reliably is surprisingly tricky—models don’t always follow instructions, JSON can be malformed, and edge cases abound. This guide covers robust output parsing strategies: using JSON mode for guaranteed valid JSON, Pydantic for type-safe parsing, handling partial and streaming outputs, implementing retry logic for […]
Read more →Month: July 2024
Ollama: The Complete Guide to Running Open Source LLMs Locally
Introduction: Ollama has revolutionized how developers run large language models locally. With a simple command-line interface and seamless hardware acceleration, you can have Llama 3.2, Mistral, or CodeLlama running on your laptop in minutes—no cloud API keys, no usage costs, complete privacy. Built on llama.cpp, Ollama abstracts away the complexity of model quantization, memory management, […]
Read more →Agent Tool Selection: Building AI Agents That Choose and Use the Right Tools
Introduction: AI agents become powerful when they can use tools—searching the web, querying databases, calling APIs, executing code. But tool selection is where many agent implementations fail. The agent might choose the wrong tool, call tools with incorrect parameters, or get stuck in loops trying tools that won’t work. This guide covers practical patterns for […]
Read more →Cost Optimization for AI Workloads: Tracking and Reducing LLM Costs
Last quarter, our LLM costs hit $12,000. In a single month. We had no idea where the money was going. No tracking, no budgets, no alerts. That’s when I realized: cost optimization isn’t optional for AI workloads—it’s survival. Here’s how we cut costs by 65% without sacrificing quality. Figure 1: Cost Optimization Architecture The $12,000 […]
Read more →Conversation State Management: Context Tracking, Slot Filling, and Dialog Flow
Introduction: Conversational AI applications need to track state across turns—remembering what users said, what information has been collected, and where they are in multi-step workflows. Unlike simple Q&A, task-oriented conversations require slot filling, context tracking, and flow control. This guide covers practical state management patterns: conversation context objects, slot-based information extraction, finite state machines for […]
Read more →Cloud-Native Machine Learning: Building Scalable Models for Production
The journey from experimental machine learning models to production-grade systems represents one of the most challenging transitions in modern software engineering. After spending two decades building distributed systems and watching countless ML projects struggle to move beyond proof-of-concept, I’ve developed a deep appreciation for cloud-native approaches that treat machine learning infrastructure with the same rigor […]
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