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.