Context Construction, Guardrails, and the Model Gateway
~50 min read
The three highest-leverage components in any production AI system: assembling context before the model call, filtering inputs and outputs, and routing requests to the right model at the right cost.
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Key points
- •Context quality (what goes into the window) determines answer quality more than model size for retrieval-intensive tasks
- •Input guardrails are cheap (milliseconds) and block expensive model calls for invalid requests — always put them first
- •A model gateway centralizes routing, retries, fallback, and cost tracking — without one, each feature reinvents this logic independently