Using cake-baking as an extended metaphor, this piece breaks down the essential infrastructure components needed for sustainable AI delivery. Each ingredient represents a critical system element: CI/CD pipelines (flour), observability (eggs), governance (baking powder/salt), provenance (receipts), delegation logic (chefs), infrastructure (ovens), compute power (electricity), cooling (water), backup power (natural gas), ethics (fair-trade ingredients), data/vectors (flavorings), and AI agents (frosting). Real-world failures from Zillow, Knight Capital, Cambridge Analytica, SolarWinds, Uber, and others illustrate the consequences of missing each ingredient, along with specific tools and fixes for each component. The core argument: AI systems require disciplined engineering practices and cannot rely on experimentation alone.
Sort: