Using OpenAI Safely in Production Apps

Risks to Think About

• Unexpected content
• Long or expensive responses
• Outages or rate limiting
• Data privacy

My Guardrail Checklist

• System prompts that clearly define allowed behaviors
• Max tokens set per use case
• Timeouts at HTTP level
• Fallbacks when the model is unavailable
• Redaction or anonymization before sending data

I also log enough metadata to debug issues without storing sensitive raw content where it’s not needed.