The AI in Production Playbook

Twelve checks to run before an AI feature reaches your users, whether it is a single prompt, a RAG pipeline or an agent. Each one comes from a failure that made it into a post. Printable, one page per check.

1. 01An eval set before the first promptTwenty real cases and a diff catch most regressions before users do.
2. 02Know what the model can seeContext, retrieval and grounding decide quality more than the model choice.
3. 03Every call has a budgetLatency, tokens and spend are limits you set, never defaults you discover.
4. 04Fail safely, and visiblyTimeouts, fallbacks and a trace for every request, so failures are cheap and findable.
5. ··Eight more insideRetrieval quality, prompt versioning, guardrails, agent stop conditions, cost caps, human handoff, and more.