Production-grade LLMs and agents: a field guide

Building production-grade large language models (LLMs) and agents requires more than just larger models; it demands a structured system with determinism, evaluation, confidence calibration, safety guardrails, audit trails, and observability. The article presents a maturity model outlining six progressive levels of system robustness, from basic demos to disciplined, operable production builds, emphasizing the need to address each level sequentially for reliable deployment.