You review a 30-line template diff. Production sends 40,000 tokens assembled at request time from six sources, four of which changed this week and none of which appear in the pull request. The diff you approved is not the change you shipped.

This is the part of LLMOps that keeps biting teams after they have evals, tracing, and a gateway in place. The template is versioned in git. The context is assembled by code paths nobody treats as release artifacts.

The prompt is a build output

List what actually goes into a request for a typical RAG-plus-tools system:

The system template (in git, reviewed).

Top-k retrieved chunks from an index that gets rebuilt on its own schedule.

Tool JSON schemas, whose descriptions are prompt text written by whoever last touched the tool.

A conversation summary produced by another model call.

A user profile or tenant config blob.

Few-shot examples chosen at runtime by a selector.

Each is a dependency with its own version and its own deploy cadence.…