Narayanaraj Dharmalingam — Writing https://narayanaraj.com/writing Engineering notes on LLM cost reduction, agent observability, Kubernetes for AI and EU AI sovereignty, from systems that run in production. en Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT An audit trail for every LLM call: why I built the evidence layer first https://narayanaraj.com/writing/an-audit-trail-for-every-llm-call https://narayanaraj.com/writing/an-audit-trail-for-every-llm-call Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT EU AI sovereignty & self-hosted LLMs On nCloud I put a hash-chained audit gateway in front of every model call before choosing a model, because the record is the part a customer has to prove. How we cut Claude inference costs 38% in production https://narayanaraj.com/writing/cutting-claude-inference-costs-38-percent https://narayanaraj.com/writing/cutting-claude-inference-costs-38-percent Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT LLM cost engineering Model routing, response caching and prompt compression cut Claude inference cost 38% on a multi-tenant marketplace platform run by two engineers, with quality held. Is the cheaper model good enough? Evaluating LLM routing before it takes traffic https://narayanaraj.com/writing/is-the-cheaper-model-good-enough https://narayanaraj.com/writing/is-the-cheaper-model-good-enough Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT Agent observability & evaluation How to prove a cheaper model is good enough before it takes production traffic: a fixed evaluation set, per-class scores, a checked judge, then a canary. One OpenTelemetry layer across four clouds: moving off ELK without a coverage gap https://narayanaraj.com/writing/one-opentelemetry-layer-across-four-clouds https://narayanaraj.com/writing/one-opentelemetry-layer-across-four-clouds Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT Kubernetes for AI workloads How a live airline operations platform moved from ELK log shipping to OpenTelemetry Collectors, with sampling at the edge and no gap in coverage. Routing between Haiku, Sonnet and Opus: a decision table that works https://narayanaraj.com/writing/routing-between-haiku-sonnet-and-opus https://narayanaraj.com/writing/routing-between-haiku-sonnet-and-opus Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT LLM cost engineering A code-level walk through a heuristic router for Claude models: the decision table, the classifier signals, escalation, and the numbers to watch before you trust it.