A 5-minute visual explainer of what happens when you call an LLM API
HowDevelop · x · 2026-10-28
Developer sujeedev released a 5-minute visual explainer tracing a single LLM API request end to end: client → gateway → tokenizer → router → queue → GPU (prefill + decode) → streamed response.
Along the way it covers key inference optimizations:
- KV caching / prompt caching
- Cache-aware routing
- Continuous batching
- Disaggregated prefill/decode
- Speculative decoding
The content comes from the author's Hacktoberfest 2026 talk, with the full talk and repo linked in the replies — a solid intro for engineers wanting to understand LLM serving stacks.
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