Towards Data Science

Don’t Just “Throw Adam at It”: Misunderstanding Adam Will Cost You

You "vibe coded" the import. Understand Adam's optimization dynamics, why it fails spectacularly, and how to fix it.

Towards Data Science
May 29

RAG Is Burning Money — I Built a Cost Control Layer to Fix It

Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost—and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circuit breaking, achieving an 85% reduction in LLM costs without sacrificing answer quality.

By Emmimal P Alexander