The following article originally appeared on Gradient Flow and is being reposted here with the author’s permission.
We’re living through a peculiar moment in AI development. On one hand, the demos are spectacular: agents that reason and plan with apparent ease, models that compose original songs from a text prompt, and research tools that produce detailed reports in minutes. Yet many AI teams find themselves trapped in “prototype purgatory,” where impressive proofs-of-concept fail to translate into reliable, production-ready systems.