# Building Production-Ready LLM Applications: What Usually Breaks After the Prototype?

> Source: <https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/building-production-ready-llm-applications-what-usually-breaks-after-the-prototype/178939#post_1>
> Published: 2026-08-20 06:10:25+00:00

Many LLM and Generative AI projects perform well during the prototype stage but become much harder to manage once they move toward production.

Some of the challenges I frequently see include:

I’m interested in learning how others in the Hugging Face community approach this transition.

For production LLM or conversational AI applications:

**What has been your biggest challenge moving from a working prototype to a reliable production system?**

Also, which approach has worked best for you: fine-tuning, RAG, prompt optimization, smaller specialized models, or a combination of these?

Would be great to hear practical experiences, architectures, evaluation methods, or Hugging Face tools/models that have worked well.