Production LLM Guardrails: 8 Controls Every AI Team Needs

Most AI projects fail somewhere between demo works and production ships . The gap is rarely the model. It's the absence of the controls that turn a one-shot prompt into a system you can run, audit, and iterate on without setting fire to the budget. I made the chart above as the one-page version of the controls I would put on any AI team's first production sprint. Eight of them, organized by which side of the model they shape: Input, Reasoning, Output, Operations. Below is the why-each-matters an