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I got a LinkedIn message last month from someone who, six weeks earlier, had been a marketing coordinator. Now they were an “AI Solutions Architect” offering to help companies “integrate LLMs into their workflow.” No code samples, no GitHub, no prior engineering background. Just a new title and a calendar link.
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That message wasn’t an isolated thing. Every gold rush attracts far more people panning for gold than people who will ever find any, and this one is no different. What’s interesting isn’t that it’s happening. What’s interesting is how much it’s distorting what developers think “AI work” actually is, and how many of them are underestimating what it takes to build something that survives contact with real users.
I’ve spent the last couple of years watching teams bolt AI features onto products, and the pattern is consistent. The demo takes an afternoon. The thing that actually holds up in production takes months, and most of that time has nothing to do with prompting.
Calling an API was never the hard part #
Anyone can wire up a chat completion in twenty lines of code. That’s not a skill…