---
title: "Direct LLM Integration Guide"
description: "A 15-page engineering guide to integrating directly with the LLM API. No frameworks."
source: "https://www.kensink.com/resources/llm-integration-guide/"
canonical: "https://www.kensink.com/resources/llm-integration-guide/"
---
● LEAD MAGNET · 15 PAGES

# Direct LLM  
integration guide.

A 15-page engineering guide to integrating directly with the LLM API the way you integrate with Postgres. No agent frameworks. No orchestration vendors. Code samples and runbook templates included.

WHAT'S INSIDE · 05 CHAPTERS

## Five chapters. For engineers.

01

### Auth, retries, and the basics nobody documents

Idempotency keys, exponential backoff, request hashing for replay debugging.

02

### Structured output without a framework

JSON-schema, function-calling, and the four failure modes you need to handle.

03

### Embeddings and retrieval, from scratch

pgvector, hybrid search, why your “cosine similarity is bad” problem is actually a chunking problem.

04

### Eval suites your team will actually maintain

How to write 50 examples that beat 5,000, plus the CI integration that keeps them honest.

05

### Observability for LLM systems

Latency, cost, quality, and prompt-injection telemetry in one dashboard. Tooling we use, in order.