Imagine a chef who only cooks in a test kitchen with perfect ingredients. Real kitchens have burnt onions and angry customers.
The demo is the trailer. Production is the movie.
Making It Simple
The demo is the trailer. Production is the movie.
The Orthodoxy
The current orthodoxy on tech adoption rests on three pillars:
1. Latest model = best results
2. Complex orchestration = sophistication
3. Vendor solutions = de-risking
These pillars support a massive ecosystem of tools, courses, certifications, and consulting.
They’re also wrong in ways that hurt people.
Why It’s Wrong
Take enterprise ai budgets: 80% on compute/inference, 15% on tooling, 5% on eval – should be inverted. This isn’t a fringe view – it’s the conclusion you reach when you follow the evidence instead of the hype.
RAG looks trivial in demos. In production: chunking strategy, embedding drift, eval sets, latency budgets, cost per query
The orthodoxy persists because it’s profitable, not because it’s true.
The Counter-Evidence
The evidence against the orthodoxy:
1. Fine-tuning is the new ‘we’ll build our own database’ – almost never the right answer
2. The vendors selling ‘AI transformation’ have never operated a 24/7 system with SLAs
This pattern – confident consensus, quiet contradictory evidence – repeats across every domain AI touches.
What Few People See
While everyone debates enterprise ai budgets: 80% on compute/inference, 15% on tooling, 5% on eval – should be inverted, the real shift is happening elsewhere:
RAG looks trivial in demos. In production: chunking strategy, embedding drift, eval sets, latency budgets, cost per query
This is the second-order effect. The first-order effect gets the headlines. The second-order effect changes the world.
The Stakes
This isn’t academic. The stakes are concrete:
– A generation learning to prompt instead of learning to think
– Companies burning 7-figure budgets on AI that produces negative ROI
– Concentration of AI capability in 3 companies creating systemic fragility
The cost of the comfortable consensus is paid by the people closest to the work.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
So here’s the uncomfortable truth: Vector databases are mostly unnecessary for <100k docs - Postgres pgvector or SQLite-vec works fine And: The 'it works on my machine' problem is now 'it works in the playground but hallucinates in production' The people who navigate this aren't the ones with the best prompts or the biggest GPU clusters. They're the ones willing to be wrong in public, to kill their darlings, to optimize for truth over consensus. That's always been the edge. AI just made it more visible.