Reducing LLM Costs Is Easy — Until Production Starts

A month ago, I wrote about reducing LLM costs using caching. The idea is simple: don’t send the same or similar request to the model twice. It works well in demos. It even works well in early testing. And then production starts. Production Reality: Where LLM Systems Start Breaking At first, everything looks under control. Requests are small, traffic is predictable, and caching delivers immediate savings. You see fewer calls to the model and faster responses. It feels like the p...