Last quarter one of our engineers made a small edit to a system prompt. Pushed it directly. No review, no history, nothing.
Within an hour our AI was responding to users with completely wrong answers.
We had no idea what changed. No diff to look at. No rollback button. Just three of us staring at the codebase trying to reverse-engineer a single line edit that had already been overwritten.
Three months. Two developers. One feature nobody used.
I knew it was bad when I checked the analytics and saw that the only person who used it more than once was me. And even I stopped after the second week.
Here's how I knew it was a waste of time. Not in hindsight. In the moment. I just ignored the signs.
The first sign: I couldn't explain it in one sentence.