I Built a Glossary of LLM Terms That Actually Explains What They Change in Production

When I started building with LLMs, I kept running into terms I didn't fully understand. Quantization, KV cache, top-k sampling, temperature. Every time I looked one up, I got either a textbook definition or a link to a paper. That told me what the term is . It didn't tell me what to do with it. What decision does it affect? What breaks if I ignore it? What tradeoff am I making? So I started keeping notes. For each term, I wrote down the production angle: why it matters when you're actually shipp