Cache write, cache read, refresh, breakpoint, TTL, storage fee. Six words that mean different things at different providers — and one of them costs money while you sleep. A working glossary for engineers and the people who approve their invoices.
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Three providers, three incompatible cost shapes, and three rules of thumb that survive the next repricing. Includes the side-by-side chart and the arithmetic behind each rule.
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Cache writes now cost 1.25x on OpenAI's flagship line, and the default breakpoint lands on your most volatile content. There's no TTL to tune — the whole optimisation is boundary placement and key discipline. Worked four ways.
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Anthropic is the only provider where the TTL you pick changes your write price. Here's the break-even math for an orchestrator, a sub-agent, a chatbot, and a high-volume extraction pipeline — plus the clock-start rule that makes most cadence estimates wrong.
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Google charges no write premium and no read penalty — it charges rent. That inverts the whole decision: the question isn't cadence, it's reads per hour. Below roughly three, explicit caching costs you money. Worked four ways.
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A working proof of concept and a funded, trusted production agent are different problems. Here's the three-part case — the cost you're replacing, the actual cost of running it, and evidence it's improving — that gets an agent like an automated bug-fixer taken seriously by the people who fund it.
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Silent failures don't crash — they silently frustrate your customers while you are none the wiser. We rank the five best strategies and open-source tools for catching agents that quietly fail, each scored on signal caught per hour of effort.
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We compared gateway overhead across GoModel, Bifrost, Portkey, and LiteLLM — hot-path latency, memory, and cold starts that matter once you're routing real production traffic. Here's why we lean toward GoModel, first in a new series on AI tool bakeoffs.
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