The Prism Blog
Engineering notes, product updates, and deep dives on AI API routing, model selection, and building with LLMs.
The Prism Blog covers AI API engineering for developers, written by Ravi Patel, founder of Ssimplifi. Posts focus on hands-on engineering rather than industry commentary. Topics covered:
- Cost optimization — how to cut AI API spend 30–50% by routing simple queries to cheaper models without losing quality.
- Model comparisons — Claude vs GPT-4o vs Gemini benchmarks on real developer workloads (code generation, classification, reasoning).
- Provider quirks — differences in streaming behavior, error handling, and token counting across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
- Build-in-public — engineering decisions and architecture notes from shipping Prism.
- Tutorials — integrating multi-model routing, session memory, and automatic failover into production apps.
All posts
- ·6 min read
The 50ms promise I made in v1.6
Last week I shipped the edge layer and admitted I'd promised 50ms cache hits but only delivered 300-500ms. Here's the follow-up that closes the gap: Workers KV replication, why it took one day not the two I'd guessed, and what the actual numbers look like.
aiapiedgelatencycloudflareworkers-kvdeveloper-tools - ·7 min read
Putting Prism's front door on every continent
v1.6 moves Prism's auth and cache layer onto Cloudflare's edge network. International customers now get auth rejections and cache hits hundreds of milliseconds faster, without changing how Prism actually works. Honest reporting on what shipped and what's still gated on v1.6.5.
aiapiedgelatencycloudflaredeveloper-toolsinfrastructure - ·6 min read
How we route around a 20-minute Anthropic outage
Provider outages should be a routing problem, not a customer problem. v1.5 ships Redis-backed rolling-window health, streaming-aware failover, and speculative parallel routing on sport mode.
aiapireliabilityfailoverdeveloper-toolsproduction-ai - ·7 min read
How to stop your AI bill from surprising you
Budgets aren't about not spending. They're about predictability. Policy isn't about restricting. It's about consistency. v1.4 ships routing rules + monthly budget caps + an audit log on the Prism dashboard.
aiapibudgetgovernancepolicydeveloper-toolsproduction-ai - ·5 min read
What was that request, exactly? Observability for the AI proxy layer
Caching tells you how much you saved. Observability tells you what just happened. v1.3 ships request explorer, per-feature cost attribution, latency histograms, and feedback capture on the Prism dashboard.
aiapiobservabilitydeveloper-toolsmonitoringproduction-ai - ·6 min read
Your AI bill, minus the AI you've already paid for
Most AI traffic is repeated traffic — the same prompts, the same near-duplicates, the same system messages. Caching is the difference between paying once and paying every time. Here's the math, the layers, and where Prism lands.
aiapicachingcost-optimizationdeveloper-toolssemantic-cache - ·5 min read
MCP Is a Transport Layer Pretending to Be a Brain
The MCP explosion gave agents access to hundreds of tools but nobody solved the coordination problem. The result is infinite loops, burned credits, and a transport layer that everyone is treating like intelligence.
mcpaideveloper toolsapiindie hacking - ·4 min read
The Merging Take Is Too Early
Everyone is calling for AI coding tools to consolidate. We are not in the merging phase — we are in the explosion phase. Calling for consolidation right now is reading the cycle wrong.
aideveloper toolsmarket analysisindie hacking - ·7 min read
The Hidden Cost of Stateless AI APIs
Every AI API is stateless, which means you resend the entire conversation on every call. Here's what that actually costs — and why session memory matters more than you think.
aiapideveloper-toolschatbotscost-optimization - ·7 min read
There Is No Best AI Model in 2026 — And That's Actually Good News
GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro all dropped within weeks. Each is best at something different. Here's why that changes how you should build with AI.
aillmdeveloper-toolsmodel-comparison
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