10/15/2026
Every AI product sits inside an iron triangle of trade-offs
Building AI products forces the same hard choices as any other engineering effort, only the variables look different.
At design time the classic constraints reappear as feature scope, development cost and time. At run time they become response quality, latency and cost per inference.
You can improve one side of the triangle, but something else usually gives. Higher quality often means more compute or slower responses. Broader scope increases both development effort and operational cost. Faster delivery can reduce the depth of evaluation.
The useful discipline is to make the trade-offs explicit instead of discovering them in production.
When I review an AI product plan I look for:
• Which side of the triangle is currently the priority, and why?
• What is the measured cost of improving quality by a meaningful amount?
• Where are we accepting lower performance or higher cost in exchange for speed of learning?
Clear trade-offs beat optimistic assumptions every time.