A Year Inside an AI-Native Product Team. Here's What Actually Broke

I left the safety of a senior consulting role to join an AI-native team building a product with millions of LLM calls per month — to see where this change is actually taking us. This is my AI reality check.

Three questions I went in with: how product teams actually work in an AI-native setup, whether everyone should build, and what it even means to ship a product where your core is non-deterministic AI.

What I found was messier than any framework I know. I'll share what we got wrong, what we tried, and what I'd do differently — not from the outside, but from a year spent inside this shift.