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Budget guardrails, runaway agent patterns, and what other tools don't tell you.
Datadog added LLM observability features. LangSmith was built for it from the start. The overlap is smaller than the marketing suggests and the gaps in each direction are significant.
Vercel AI SDK is lean, streaming-first, and Next.js-native. LangChain is broad, chain-based, and Python-primary. The right choice depends on what you're building more than team preference.
The Assistants API abstracts a lot of complexity. That abstraction has a per-token cost floor you cannot optimize away. Here is what the real numbers look like at 10k, 100k, and 1M calls per month.
Token optimization isn't just about shorter prompts. Here's the complete system: structured outputs, context trimming, caching, batch APIs, and the cost governance layer that ties it together—with real production cost numbers.
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