AI in Production: Why Prompts, Filters, and Monitoring Aren’t Enough

Over the past year, LLMs have moved from demos into real production systems — agentic workflows, internal tools, customer-facing automations, and decision pipelines.

What’s surprising is that most production failures aren’t about model intelligence or latency.

They’re about trust.

The kinds of failures we keep seeing in production

In real deployments, teams usually rely on:

• careful prompt engineering
• structured outputs (JSON, schemas)
• post-hoc monitoring and logs
• human review for high-risk cases These work… until systems get more complex.

Some recurring failure modes:

1. Confident hallucinations
   Outputs are fluent, structured, and pass surface checks — but contain fabricated facts or incorrect assumptions.

2. Intent drift
   The model technically answers the prompt, but exceeds what it was allowed to do (e.g. advice instead of summarization, inference instead of extraction).

3. Contextual overreach
   LLMs pull in outside knowledge that violates domain or regulatory boundaries — especially common in agent + tool-calling setups.

4. Silent failures
   Nothing crashes. Logs look fine. But downstream systems act on invalid outputs.

These issues often pass prompts and basic validation because those tools are probabilistic and best-effort, not enforceable.

Why prompt engineering doesn’t scale

Prompts are great at guiding behavior.
They’re bad at enforcing boundaries.

Once you have:

• long-running agents
• retries and memory
• tool invocation
• multiple stakeholders relying on outputs you need something closer to contracts, not suggestions.

Introducing Verdic:

I’m working on Verdic, a validation and enforcement layer for production AI systems.

The core idea is simple:

Before an LLM output is executed, stored, or acted upon, it should be validated against an explicit intent and scope contract.

Verdic focuses on:

• Pre-execution validation (not just monitoring after the fact)
• Intent, scope, and domain compliance
• Deterministic enforcement, not “hope the prompt holds” It’s designed to sit between the LLM and the application, similar to how we validate inputs in traditional systems — but applied to AI outputs.

This isn’t about removing creativity.
It’s about making AI safe to rely on in production environments.

Why this matters now

As AI systems move into:

• fintech and regulated domains
• enterprise workflows
• internal decision systems the key question isn’t:

“Is the model smart?”

It’s:

“Can we trust the output every time, even under drift and edge cases?”
That’s an engineering and governance problem, not a model problem.

Open question to the community

For those running LLMs in production:

What failures surprised you the most?
Where did prompts and monitoring fall short?
How are you validating outputs before they cause damage?
I’m especially interested in real post-mortems, not theory.