# Why AI Engineering Is Becoming More Like Distributed Systems Engineering

> Source: <https://dev.to/vishal_kumar_087e1b0ad5b4/why-ai-engineering-is-becoming-more-like-distributed-systems-engineering-210l>
> Published: 2026-05-21 20:45:18+00:00

As foundation models continue to improve, I think AI engineering is starting to look far more like distributed systems engineering.
The difficult part usually is not the model itself - it is everything around it:
- Orchestration
- Retries
- Queues
- Workflow state
- Observability
- Evaluation
- Scaling
A production AI workflow can very quickly become:
- Retrieval
- Multiple LLM/tool calls
- Async processing
- Validation
- Downstream systems
At that point, you are dealing with classic system problems rather than just prompting.