Towards Data Science By Emmimal P Alexander

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

Read the original on Towards Data Science →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at Towards Data Science.

Towards Data Science
Jul 24

Loop Engineering for RAG Generation: An LLM Cascade from a Cheap Local Model Up to a Hosted Flagship

Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol. 1 #8quater] - Two angles on the cascade, cost and a validation loop, backed by a real sweep of twenty local models against a hosted flagship The post Loop Engineering for RAG Generation: An LLM Cascade from a Cheap Local Model Up to a Hosted Flagship appeared first on Towards Data Science .

By Kezhan Shi
Simon Willison
Sep 14

Quoting Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss argues that while the cost of writing code has fallen dramatically, the costs of reviewing, fixing, and operating software are rising and will continue to do so. She emphasizes that the true expense lies in understanding user needs, precisely defining requirements, and ensuring a pleasant user experience—costs that are unique to each software product and do not scale with reuse. As software demand grows without an upper limit, these user‑centric costs will dominate the overall development effort.