Prasad

Aug 9, 2026

Is anyone actually shipping AI features, or are we all still prototyping?

Every team I talk to has an LLM prototype. Very few have one in front of paying users. The gap seems to come down to unglamorous things: • What happens when the model returns nonsense at 2am and nobody notices? • How do you test something whose output changes between runs? • Who pays when a single user pastes a 40,000-token document? I am not asking whether it is useful — clearly it can be. I am asking what it took to get from demo to production, and what you cut to get there. If you have shipped something real, I would genuinely like to hear what broke first.