Practice · 2023–now · AI Present
Chatbot wrapper as product
Slap an LLM on the homepage and call it AI-native — "we have an app now," 2010 edition.
Chatbot wrappers failed as products because a prompt over public docs is a feature, not a company. They stuck as support widgets with clear metrics. The costly fad was fundraising on the chat box while competitors shipped workflows with ownership and evals.
Cost of the fad
Homepage chat boxes billed as AI-native platforms while the roadmap stayed FAQ search with a spinner. Acquisition decks outpaced retention.
Patterns
Context
Demos consolidate; evals remain
AI pair programming changed how code is typed faster than how it is reviewed. Agent frameworks and standalone vector stores sorted into demos versus durable plumbing; mid-market RAG folded back into Postgres. The permanent layer is familiar: evals that gate deploys, model routing for cost, tool protocols instead of plugin snowflakes, and humans who own production. Autopilot rewrites and vibe-shipped auth middleware are still big-bang migrations with better slides — and a longer on-call.
Compare with
Related
Framework · 2023–now
LLM app frameworks
LangChain-class glue gave way to vendor SDKs and thin wrappers. The durable pieces are boring: evals, retrieval, and product UX.
Practice · 2023–now
RAG as default architecture
Retrieval-augmented generation as the answer to every knowledge problem — then "just stuff the window" as the counter-fad. Often right; often Postgres with pgvector would suffice.
$ Teams stood up vector pipelines, chunking strategies, and rerankers before asking if fine-tuning or a SQL query would answer the question. Retrieval infra became the product.
Practice · 2024–now
Eval theater
LLM evals as slideware — metrics that look scientific and never gate a deploy. The foil to real eval pipelines in CI.
$ Dashboards of vibe-check scores that never blocked a release. Green charts for leadership; prod still hallucinated.
Practice · 2023–now
Prompt injection as afterthought
Ship the chatbot, bolt on security later — OWASP's new category, same old afterthought.
$ Customer-facing chatbots shipped with tool access and "security in phase two." Indirect injection via docs and tickets became the new XSS.