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AI System Architecture Patterns

Capstone view of production AI systems: how context construction, guardrails, model routers/gateways, semantic caching, agent orchestration, observability, and user feedback loops fit together into one coherent, operable architecture. Grounded in Chip Huyen's AI Engineering Ch.10 framework.

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📚 Prerequisites(5)

🎓 Learning objectives

  • Draw the end-to-end request path through a production AI system: ingress → guardrail → cache → model gateway → response pipeline → observability
  • Explain how context construction (retrieval, memory, tool results) feeds into the model call and what determines context quality
  • Design a model router/gateway that selects between models based on task complexity, cost, and latency targets
  • Describe semantic caching and when it reduces latency without degrading quality
  • Identify where agent orchestration adds concurrency and how to bound its blast radius in production
  • Design an observability stack covering traces, metrics, and evaluation signals for a multi-step AI system
  • Explain how to extract user feedback from conversation signals and use it to close the improvement loop

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📂 Subtopics

Related concepts

semantic cachingmodel routingcontext engineeringguardrailsLLM observabilityagent patternsRAGhuman-in-the-loopLLM-as-judgeprompt injectioncontext window managementrate limitingstreaming

Next to learn

recommendation-system-componentsllm-observabilityevaluation-pipeline-designagent-patterns