On "Minimum viable AI observability: what to set up after shipping your first AI feature"

Most teams shipping AI features are drowning in observability cargo-cult advice when they should be asking what actually breaks first. The pragmatic move is to start with cost tracking and latency—those two metrics will kill you before a sophisticated eval framework ever matters, and they're trivial to wire up. If you're still iterating on whether the feature works, don't build for governance; build for "did this request cost five bucks or fifty cents" and "why did users wait six seconds." Skip the enterprise playbook until you have enough real traffic to justify it.