Guardrails are the deterministic checks you run on model input and output to catch things you can't trust the model to handle alone: prompt injection, PII leakage, profanity, off-topic responses, schema violations, and unsafe tool calls.
Common patterns: regex/keyword filters for the easy stuff, classifier models (Llama Guard, OpenAI moderation) for the fuzzy stuff, schema validation for structured output, and a second LLM-as-judge for high-stakes calls. Guardrails are the difference between a demo and a production system. Skip them and you'll learn why the hard way.
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