Stripe Minions says 'The walls matter more than the model,' but the case studies from four Silicon Valley companies never explained how to actually build those walls. This post breaks down the 15 walls we implemented in the daodao auto-dev agent: what each wall prevents, where the files live, and what the tradeoffs are. Tier 1 is mandatory, Tier 2 strengthens governance, Tier 3 is serious governance.
RAG system costs come from LLM tokens, Embedding APIs, and vector search. Every stage has room for cost reduction, but you need to verify that optimizations don't sacrifice too much quality.
Limiting request count alone is not enough — a single long query can consume ten times the tokens of a normal one. Dual quotas (request count + token count) are what truly control costs.