A spending limit is a circuit breaker, not a budget. When it trips your API stops serving traffic, which means the limit protects you from a runaway bill by causing...
The reason AI tools mangle long files is almost never comprehension. It is that asking a model to reproduce a 2,000-line file guarantees a truncated or silently altered copy. The...
Most systems send every request to one model, and that single decision is usually the largest avoidable line on the bill. Classification, extraction and routing do not need a frontier...
Assume every token you send to a model is written to a log you do not control. Not because providers are careless, but because prompts pass through your own logging,...
Vision requests fail for two unrelated reasons that look similar: the HTTP request body is physically too big, or the images consume more of the context window than you have...
A stream that dies mid-response is usually killed by something between you and the provider, not by the model. Proxies, load balancers and serverless platforms enforce idle and total-duration timeouts...
When a tool call arrives with arguments you cannot parse, the model is almost never inventing malformed JSON at random. Three causes account for nearly all of it: the arguments...
An insufficient_quota error is a billing problem wearing a rate-limit costume. It arrives as HTTP 429, the same status as an ordinary rate limit, but it means your account has...
Usually the JSON is not invalid, it is incomplete or wrapped in prose. Regex repair is a symptom of not using constrained output.
If the reply stops mid-sentence the model did not fail, it hit your output ceiling. The response is a 200, so most code never notices.