The monthly bill was ten times the estimate. Investigation took two hours. Three things were wrong. A retry loop was calling the model on every validation error — including schema mismatches that woul
The fallback was supposed to be temporary. When the OpenAI API was unavailable, the service would return the last cached result for that user rather than failing the request. Clean degraded experience
The integration looked solid. In testing, the AI-powered document extraction service worked exactly as designed — pull a PDF, send it to the model, parse the structured output, write to the database.
