Six Common LLM Integration Mistakes That Cause Production Failures

A technical guide highlights six structural coding mistakes that make LLM applications appear functional during demos but fail under real-world traffic. Key issues include using boolean flags to control streaming responses instead of separate functions, and failing to wrap streaming calls in context managers, which causes silent connection leaks. Other pitfalls involve truncating chat history mid-conversation pair, skipping vector normalization before cosine similarity search, and applying blanket retry logic to all errors including non-transient ones. The guide also recommends pairing retry logic with a fallback model to handle extended outages gracefully rather than serving errors to users. Each mistake is described as a small, structural decision whose consequences only surface at the worst possible moment in production.