I’d never heard about this conference before, the talks look super interesting. I wish more people in the industry cared about working software. The bar seems to only be getting lower in this age of AI. I always love finding a batch of new people to follow and new conferences to daydream about attending.
This is a great write up about how Airbnb ships AI features that actually work. Basically, the answer is they test them. What a concept! It sounds really dumb and obvious when you say it out loud, but it’s been surprising to me how many teams are shipping LLM-based systems to production with no test harnesses or evals at all.
Expect to spend a meaningful share of your total project effort on evaluation. This is not unnecessary overhead, it’s how you build products that actually work.
This is anathema to the way of working that the types of people who love AI default to. The industry is overrun right now with enthusiastic “builders” who care much more about velocity than quality. AI has made a lot of people think shipping software is easy because shipping vapourware demos has become 1000% easier than it used to be. But a prototype is not a product. Making software that works for you on the happy path is genuinely easy now. But making it work for someone else on the actual wild internet is still extremely difficult. As a user of many software products, I can say I wish people cared a bit more about whether their AI features worked in production.