The AI Feature Nobody Asked For (And Why I Built It Anyway)

The AI Feature Nobody Asked For (And Why I Built It Anyway) Here's a thing I've learned after three decades writing code: clients don't always know what they need until they see it working. Last month, I shipped an AI feature for a client that wasn't in the original spec. Not even close. They wanted a basic chat interface for their support docs — pretty straightforward, right? Feed the LLM their documentation, let customers ask questions, call it a day. Standard RAG pattern. We've all built a dozen of these by now. But something about this one bugged me. The Problem They Didn't Mention Their docs were... fine. Technically accurate. But they'd been written over five years by different people, and you could feel it. Tone shifted. Examples got stale. Some sections were way too detailed while others basically said "figure it out yourself." I'm watching the LLM try to answer questions, and it's pulling from three different docs that contradict each other. The AI's doing its best to synthesi