Everyone is adding AI to their product right now. Most of them are doing it wrong.
Not because they chose the wrong model. Not because they used the wrong library. But because they treated AI integration like a regular feature and skipped all the engineering discipline that production systems require.
I have integrated LLMs into multiple production applications. This is what I wish I had known before I started.
The Mental Model Shift You Need First
A traditional API call is deterministic. You send a request, you get a predictable response. You can write tests against it. You can cache it. You can reason about it.
