When designing LLM-based applications, it’s tempting to go with the best-in-class of any component in the content generation pipeline. Yet, especially in consumer use cases, we must evaluate trade-offs to balance content quality and performances, as they both severely impact UX and one cannot compensate the other.

Picking from our own experience building a consumer app serving users real-time content generated on the fly with a complex LLM pipeline, we will explore lessons learnt, tips and tricks to find the sweet spot between these two contrasting forces.