Instructions
AI products face scale challenges that conventional software doesn't. The biggest ones aren't performance in the traditional sense — they're economic, adversarial, and architectural. Understanding these challenges before you hit them is the difference between scaling smoothly and discovering fundamental problems at the worst possible time.
The most common scale trap for AI founders is unit economics. At small scale, inference costs are manageable. At 10x or 100x users, they can become significant enough to threaten the business model — especially if your usage patterns are more intensive than you expected. This needs modelling before you hit it, not after.
AI products also attract adversarial use at scale. Some users will try to jailbreak your prompts, extract your system inst...
