Software development IS NOT CHEAP! You cannot build scalable AI systems for free.
I get it, AI has made it easier to build software, but it’s not as if you can magically do months worth of coding in days or even weeks. Sales reps and business owners have VERY UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS! Here’s the pattern I’ve discovered: There are a bunch of creators who have hyped people up, saying you do not need to have coding knowledge to build AI systems. Is it true? No. Unless your job is to build small demos/MVPs or content on AI. You might be able to sell your “product” by showing your leads the automation you built on n8n but when it’s time to deploy it into the real world, it’ll fail on day 1. Here’s a recent case study from one of my leads: They needed a WhatsApp reservation and admin system for a network of ~9000 restaurants. So they did what most people feel is the logical solution, hire developers. The developers that they had, built a WhatsApp bot using n8n. They showed it to the client, it worked fine. Because obviously it’s a simple chatbot so you can’t really do much with it except talk. Can you jailbreak it? Piece of cake. Does it have any logical awareness? No. Is it anywhere close to a usable demo? Not at all. So they start reaching out to people who can actually build the system. That’s where I come into picture. They tell me, they already have a system built “halfway” and need me to finish it in the next 3 days (that too for free lmfao, I’ll get to this part later). My CTO sits with their developer and sees the system they had. Surprise! The system is just an n8n template copy pasted with vibe coding done all over (the guy didn’t even remove the ChatGPT comments in the code). So I tell them, that this cannot be done within 3 days. Your system is pretty much useless, we’ll have to build everything from scratch. We can give you a small demo in the next 12 days, but that requires a certain upfront payment so that we can start working. That’s where he paused and told “he’ll talk to his partners”. Apparently all of their budget was already allocated to marketing, they hired a lot of sales people and could only allocate the budget for “API Token costs”.