A B2B SaaS founder spent four months and $60,000 with an AI developer they found through a popular talent platform. The system was "in production." Clients were using it.
Then the complaints started. The AI was saying strange things on calls. Missing responses. Going silent mid-conversation.
Our backend engineer looked at the codebase. Not a full audit. Twenty minutes.
Hardcoded API keys in the application code. A RAG pipeline returning accurate results 40–50% of the time. Call classification running through the LLM on every single call, burning tokens to answer a question a 0.33-millisecond logistic regression model handles at 97% accuracy. End-to-end latency averaging 8–10 seconds per conversation turn.
The developer had tested it on clean audio. Quiet rooms. Scripted conversations. It worked beautifully in demos.
