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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Building Natural Language and LLM Pipelines
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In this chapter, we traced the rapid evolution of the LLM landscape from the 2023 baseline to the specialized 2025 agentic stack. We learned how the monolithic models of the past (BERT, GPT-3) have given way to a new, specialized spectrum, from hyper-efficient SLMs for edge computing to advanced RLMs like DeepSeek-R1.
We saw how developer interaction has matured from prompt engineering to the formal discipline of context engineering, a set of strategies (write, select, compress, isolate) for managing an agent's information environment. We also analyzed how the framework market has specialized in serving this new reality. LangGraph 1.0 has emerged as the leader for agentic control-flow, while Haystack 2.0 has solidified its role as the leader for reliable, auditable dataflow.
We then examined the critical economic realities of this new stack, clarifying that the dominant, recurring cost for developers is inference, not training. This requires a focus on TCO, which...