A clever prompt that costs $2 and takes 30s per call won't ship. This is the layer where AI engineering meets real systems work — your home turf. Descend.
⚡The demo flew. In production it's slow, the bill scales with every user, and nobody knows which knob to turn.
LEVEL 1 — REMEMBER · the vocabulary
⚓ ANCHOR · IF YOU ALREADY KNOW
Serving a model is serving any request: TTFT is your first-byte latency, decode is a sequential loop so output length drives the tail, and cost scales with work done. The levers are the usual ones — cache, batch, right-size.