The AI agent used to be the star of every demo.

Now it's on the shutdown list. Not because the model got worse.

The most valuable asset in your AI program is in none of the quotes you ever signed.

A demo is a showroom. Good light, everything polished, everything runs.

Production is the engine room. It runs there too. Until 2am, when it snags on a rate limit and someone crawls into the logs with a flashlight, forms a hypothesis, and catches an edge case no showroom ever planned for.