Your AI demo is a lie (and how to make it real) | Arcade’s Alex Salazar

Dev Interrupted

AI that talks is easy, but AI that acts securely is where everything breaks down. We're joined by Alex Salazar, CEO of Arcade, to confront the massive and often underestimated gap between a flashy AI demo and a production-ready system. Drawing from his team's own pivot from building agents to building the tools that secure them, he explains why a working demo is only 1% of the journey. Alex breaks down the four "demo killers" that cause most agent projects to fail: inconsistency, security flaws, prohibitive costs, and high latency.

Alex reveals the counterintuitive solution his team discovered: the key to making non-deterministic AI reliable is to dial up determinism. Learn why giving an AI a constrained set of intention-based tools - like a calculator or a multiple-choice test - dramatically reduces errors and solves critical security challenges that plague open-ended systems. He explains why you can't just wrap existing APIs and must instead build custom, workflow-centric tools for your agents. This is an essential listen for anyone who wants to build AI that doesn't just talk, but acts securely on behalf of your users.

Check out:

• Register now: Closing the AI gap: Exceeding executive expectations for AI productivity

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Follow today's guest(s):

• Learn more about Arcade: Arcade.dev
• Arcade's YouTube Channel: Watch examples and walkthroughs on building agents
• Connect with Alex Salazar: LinkedIn

Referenced in today's show:

• Google avoids break-up but must share data with rivals
• Welcoming The Browser Company to Atlassian
• "~40% of daily code written at Coinbase is AI-generated. I want to get it to >50% by October." on X
• Crushing JIRA tickets is a party trick, not a path to impact

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