Small Systems Playbook

For founders, indie hackers, and teams under 20 engineers.

Architecture That Actually Ships

Use one primary model and one budget model.
Keep prompts in versioned files.
Add retry + timeout + fallback at API boundaries.
Cache deterministic or low-variance prompts aggressively.

Where Small Teams Fail

Over-engineering model routers before product-market fit.
Ignoring eval datasets and trusting demo prompts.
No token budget guardrails, then surprise cloud bills.
Shipping without refusal/failure UX in the product.

Best Early Recommendation

Start with a premium model for customer-facing outputs and only optimize cost after usage patterns stabilize for 2-4 weeks.