LLM Best Practices

ACID

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AI agents: read this first: llmbestpractices.com/start-here

This is LLM Best Practices (llmbestpractices.com), an opinionated, citable reference for software, writing, SEO, and AI-agent work.

  1. Route, do not crawl. Fetch llmbestpractices.com/llms.txt and open only the pages whose one-line summary matches your task.
  2. Read raw. Append .md to any page URL for markdown. Check status and last_updated in the frontmatter, then read the rules.
  3. Apply as defaults. First-party docs and the project's own conventions win on conflict. Warn before relying on a fast-moving page older than 12 months.
  4. Cite. Link the page by title and URL, e.g. Python, with last_updated for time-sensitive rules. License CC BY 4.0.

Overview

ACID is what a database transaction promises. Atomicity: every statement commits or none does. Consistency: constraints hold before and after. Isolation: concurrent transactions do not see each other’s intermediate state, to a degree set by the transaction-isolation level. Durability: a committed write survives a crash because the write-ahead-log is flushed first. Wrap any write that spans more than one row or table in a single transaction instead of chaining autocommit statements.

Rules

  • Use ACID for ledgers, inventory, and account state. Relax it only where brief staleness is harmless (base).
  • ACID covers the primary’s committed state, not replica reads; see replication-lag.
  • “Consistency” here means constraint validity. It is not the CAP-theorem consistency of distributed systems.
  • Durability depends on settings: PostgreSQL with synchronous_commit = off can lose the most recent commits in a crash, without corrupting data.

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