AI
Shipping AI Products in 2025 - 5 Patterns I Keep Seeing
Streaming, eval suites, latency, and the deterministic features that actually wow users. Lessons from shipping voice agents, RAG bots, and AI copilots.
After shipping a handful of AI-first products this year - from a voice agent for crypto to RAG chatbots for businesses - I have noticed the same five patterns repeating. Here they are.
1. Streaming is the new loading spinner
Users will wait 20 seconds for a streamed answer but bounce after 3 seconds of a spinner. Always stream, even when you do not technically need to.
2. Pick Groq for latency, OpenAI for reasoning
Groq is jaw-droppingly fast for production loads. OpenAI still wins on multi-step reasoning. Use both, route per task.
3. Evals beat prompts
A 5-prompt eval suite catches more regressions than a month of prompt engineering. Set them up day one.
4. The killer feature is usually deterministic
The wow moment in most AI products is not the AI - it is the deterministic glue: a perfect form auto-fill, a flawless export, a clean handoff. Spend time there.
5. Latency is the new uptime
Slow AI is broken AI. Cache aggressively, parallelize calls, and measure p95 like your life depends on it.
Useful Free Tools
Improve your email deliverability, authentication, and campaign performance using these free tools.