Demos vs. production
A prototype that wows in a demo is not the same product as one that runs reliably for 30,000 users.
We've shipped a dozen AI systems into production this year. Here are the patterns that worked.
What ships
- Narrow scope, deep quality. Agents that do one thing extremely well.
- Eval first. Write 50 evals before you write the prompt.
- Human-in-the-loop. Always have a path back to a human.
- Cost ceilings. Set per-conversation budget caps at the agent level.