← ⚙️ System Design for AI in Production
Core
AI Cost and Unit Economics
Unit economics is the napkin math that decides whether an AI deployment ships: cost per request driven by input and output tokens, multiplied by volume, against the human or manual baseline it replaces. It also governs the API-versus-self-host break-even, which only flips in favor of your own GPUs above a real utilization threshold.
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RELATED CONCEPTS
LESSONS THAT TEACH THIS
Foundations of Forward Deployed EngineeringRun the engagement as a learning loop with explicit release gates28 min→Foundations of Forward Deployed EngineeringWrite a scope that can be tested, approved and changed deliberately30 min→The FDE EngagementFind the constraints that can invalidate the pilot before building it24 min→
PRACTICE THIS IN REAL QUESTIONS
LLM & GenAI FundamentalsWhat is a token, and why should an FDE care about tokenization?→System Design & Production EngineeringEstimate the capacity and cost of an app with 50k DAU making 10 LLM calls each. What do you provision for?→Behavioral & Customer ScenariosEstimate: how many LLM tokens per day would a Fortune-500 customer-support org consume?→ML System Design (Product)Build a fraud-detection model for payments.→SQL & Data EngineeringHow do you size Snowflake warehouses, when do you scale up vs scale out, and how do you keep the bill sane?→RAG & Agent System DesignRun an LLM over 10 million records nightly, within budget. Design the batch pipeline.→