Office hours: what "production-ready" actually means

I get some version of this question a lot: "we have an AI idea, we're not sure if it's actually ready to build, where do we even start."

Production-ready isn't a feeling. It's a short list: evals that give you a number instead of a vibe, guardrails for anything that writes or spends money, observability so failures show up on a dashboard before a user reports them, and a cost model that holds at 10x current usage. For a fuller walkthrough of the traps between demo and production, see From AI Demo to Production.

If you can't check those boxes yet, that's not a failure — it's just the actual next step, before more engineering time goes into features instead of foundation.