The Hidden Complexity of "Simple" Text Generation at Scale

What developers don't realize until their queue is on fire? I thought I understood the problem. You've got a list of inputs. You send each one to an LLM API. You get text back. You store it. Done — right? That's what I believed until I tried to run it at scale. Not "scale" in the Silicon Valley sense. Just: 400 product descriptions for a client's e-commerce migration, needed by Thursday, with a two-person team and a $30 API budget. The naive version worked fine for the first 40. Then it quietly