The operating cost starts after the demo

> But a demo is not a system. A demo is controlled. The input is clean, the edge cases are removed, and the happy path is selected in advance. Real work has missing data, unclear requests, old records, broken integrations, private context, bad formatting, vague instructions, and exceptions nobody wrote down.

This has been the case for decades. LLMs are just magnifying it.

That's why I feel that an important part of any engineer's development, should be working on shipping product; where they can have firsthand experience with its use "in the wild."

It can be sobering; sometimes, downright depressing.

But it's a great lesson.

Well put, and I think the problem extends beyond agentic systems to regular software. Someone in an organisation whips up a useful product, publishes it and is now on the hook for bug fixes, feature requests and operations. The maintenance cost is often much larger than the cost of building it now that producing an MVP is so easy.

Writing about the operating cost of AI tools while the whole article is a complete AI slop. :)

More AI written slop...

Just skip it.

Not worth reading.

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If I were working in marketing and I wanted to increase utilization of the nuclear power plant next door, I would wipe 50 years of computer science and introduce "agent programming" and pretend it's the future. What are the odds people would buy it? Hit send.