There are two types of developers shipping AI features

You’ve probably heard the biker saying, “there are two types of bikers: those who have crashed, and those who will.” And honestly, I’m starting to think it’s the same for anyone shipping AI features. There are people who have shipped AI that gives shitty outputs, and those who will. For a long time, I was pretty confident I was in the second camp and thought I had pretty good practices in place to prevent bad outputs. Had solid testing in place, internal demos were smooth, and the team was happy with the outputs. We were cruising (sorry, no more puns). Then last week we got a screenshot of a response that was, and I don’t say this lightly, utter garbage. I’m talking hot steaming shi… okay you get the point. We didn’t see any errors logged, and nothing on our end that would suggest things went wrong. Which really sucks because we didn’t have anything between “this is broken” and “a user notices and reports it.” Our feedback loop literally was just relying on users to reach out. Anyway. We've since fixed that, learned some things, and developed a much healthier sense of paranoia about what's actually reaching users. Sorry if this came off as just a bit of a rant but wanted to share in case others were in a similar situation. Always feels like these incidents are the thing that finally convinces people to take AI quality seriously.