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

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:09)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
This week, we're bringing Alex Salazar, CEO of Arcade.dev, on the show to discuss why a working AI demo is only 1% of the journey. Because the gap between a flashy proof of concept and a secure production-ready system is huge. And giving AI less freedom is the surprising key to making it reliable and safe for your users. But first, Ben, welcome back.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:36)
Yeah, I'm officially back. I've been out for a few weeks. You know, my wife and I, we welcomed our second son into the world. Arthur Gene Pearson had a really great summer break, took some time off, spent it with my family. I feel like I came back with some lessons learned. You know, had a bit of an AI cleanse. It was really nice, actually.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:56)
An AI cleanse? That doesn't sound like the bed I know.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:00)
Yeah, I know, right?
Yeah, I practically have not touched AI at all, pretty much since I left. There was one exception and it failed spectacularly, which is kind of hilarious. So one of the many projects I took on while I was out was I helped my four-year-old organize all of his Lego. And I had a couple of times where I just asked Chachi BT, like, hey, what is this Lego that I don't recognize? And it just like, it completely misidentified it and was not helpful whatsoever. And then another time, I think I sent it a picture of a car I was building and was like, hey, help me design a front end for this car. And it gave me some elaborate ASCII diagrams that made no sense whatsoever. And I'm completely unconvinced that it was a functional design at all. But I guess I have two lessons that I've learned from my time off. Not every problem needs to be solved with AI. And sometimes, spending a little time disconnected from it all, like AI and just technology in general, is just a really good thing. So, I encourage everyone out there, like just whether it's AI or it's just technology in general, like get disconnected a little bit, spend some time with your family or people you care about. It's been a really great summer for me. How was your summer, Andrew? You had a lot of guests on the show while it was out. It was really great to listen to.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:21)
Oh, yeah. Just while you've been out, we just had a few folks come and keep your seat warm and keep me company because I was by myself here. And so, huge thank you to all of the guests who did come on the show to help fill in new segments. I'm really looking forward to bringing more back in the future, maybe giving Ben more breaks to go play with more Legos. But I feel, having heard your story, I kind of feel actually the opposite now. I feel like we're going to be like the angel and the devil sitting on like our listener's shoulders, like advocating these two sides of the world that we're all in right now, because I mean, gosh, just last week, I was on site all day at Code TV in Portland filming a vibe coding competition I was competing in. So I just couldn't feel more different in terms of my AI usage. And your story too is funny to me, because I wonder now in my head, like is the AI seeing Lego pieces or is it seeing a car? It's kind of an interesting question.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:16)
Yeah. With that said, if we got anyone from Lego who's listening to this, I would love to help you all figure out how to train these models on Lego to help parents like me everywhere. Because, wow, I've got a whole bunch of organized Lego now and no AI to help me make sense of it all. So for now, I have to rely on antiquated instruction manuals, I guess. Classic. Yeah. So with that said, let's just get right back into it. I'm excited to get into the news. So what do we have on the docket for today, Andrew?

**Andrew Zigler** (3:47)
Oh, gosh. Well, we have some really interesting developments. One of the first ones that was big news for folks is Google avoiding a breakup with Chrome. So we've covered this before about how there was a ruling where Google had to sell Chrome and divest from its control of the browser in a monopoly ruling in the US courts, right?