A reality check on AI engineering: Lessons from the trenches of an early stage startup

lastmansurfing
Dec 21, 2025
1 min read

It can turn some unacceptable timelines into a same-day release. One of our engineers estimated a change to our voice AI orchestrator would take three days. I sanity-checked the idea with ChatGPT, had it generate a Cursor prompt, and Cursor implemented the change correctly on the first try. We shipped the whole thing in one hour: defined, coded, reviewed, tested, and deployed.

It confidently gives wrong answers. We spent an entire day trying to get ChatGPT and Gemini to solve complex AWS Amplify redirect needs.

Both insisted they had the solution. Both were absolutely wrong. Reading the docs and solving “the old-fashioned way” took two hours and revealed the LLMs’ approaches weren’t even possible.