The first demo usually takes an afternoon. Someone wires a chatbot into the support tool, it answers a billing question nicely, and everyone is impressed. Six weeks later that feature has to look up real invoices, return answers a database can store, and survive a busy Monday. That's when your Node.js LLM library, the code your team uses to talk to large language models, starts to matter.
Almost any option gets you through the demo. What separates them is what comes after, and your team will live with the choice for about two years, so the real question is which trade-offs you can carry for that long.
Below we walk through the realistic options one at a time, with real numbers, working code and where each falls short, then end with a checklist.
