Prompt Caching in Production: Architecture, Economics, and Invalidation Pitfalls
As multi-turn AI agents, code generation assistants, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines expand in production, prompt sizes routinely exceed tens of thousands of tokens per request. In these architectures, the vast majority of tokens across consecutive API calls are static: system prompts, OpenAPI tool specifications, reference documents, and accumulated conversation history. Without optimization, inference engines must re-evaluate the full attention matrix for every token on eac
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