What year-end looks like inside an AI team

This is the part of the year when teams either take stock or skip straight to next year's roadmap. The teams that take stock are the ones still shipping in March.

What the honest ones say

• "We've cleaned up maybe 40% of the prompts. The rest are still the ones we wrote first."
• "Our eval harness has been load-bearing for three months. I don't remember what we did before it."
• "Half our wins were from switching models. Half were from removing code."
• "The demo we launched with doesn't exist anymore. It's just… features, wired into the product."

What it means for 2026

Not much, individually. But taken together: teams are moving from "can we ship something AI-shaped" to "how do we maintain the thing we shipped." That's a different skill set, and most playbooks haven't caught up.

If you're picking what to invest in next quarter, pick the unglamorous stuff: eval rigor, prompt version control, observability, cost. The demos are solved.