Free Lesson
AI Architecture: Place the Model Boundary (2026)
30 min
Sep 8, 2026 1:30 PM
What you'll learn
Decide what must never be a model call
The three tests that say a step needs determinism, not fluency, and what it costs when you get them wrong.
Draw the boundary on a live system
Where the model starts and stops in a real pipeline, and what is allowed to cross in each direction.
Contain what the model gets wrong
Validation at the seam, fallbacks that degrade instead of failing, and keeping the blast radius small.
Why this topic matters
Most LLM systems fail at a seam, not in the model. A step that should have been deterministic was handed to a model, or a judgement call was hard-coded. Where you place that boundary decides your cost, your latency, your failure modes and how much of the system you can actually test. It is an architecture decision, and it is usually made by accident.
