Why AI Features Fail in Production Even When The Demo Works

The demo is usually the easy part.

Production is where the real engineering starts:

  • latency budgets
  • degraded modes
  • validation
  • observability
  • trust boundaries
  • retrieval quality
  • cost control

I wrote a practical breakdown from a software engineering angle here:

https://medium.com/p/3929c4263952

Curious which failure mode teams underestimate most.