The most valuable AI engineering skill most people skip — and the one employers actually want. Building a cool AI demo on your laptop is easy. Running it in production, where real users depend on it, is a completely different challenge.
To ship a real AI product you need to understand rate limiting, because these APIs have hard limits you can't blow past. You need caching, because every API call costs money and you don't want to pay thousands for the same responses.
You need monitoring, so you know the moment your app breaks. And you need cost management, because LLM API bills spiral out of control fast. That's what separates a side project from a real product.
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