The AI Snake Oil Era: Stop Selling Prompts Like They're Products

January 17, 2026

Alright—gloves off. We need to talk about the absolute nonsense flooding the industry right now. A massive portion of what is currently being sold as “AI products” are not products at all.

They are prompts. Usually bad ones. With a Stripe checkout slapped on the front.

We’ve reached a point where typing a clever paragraph into a ChatGPT window and adding a logo is apparently enough to call yourself an “AI startup.” People are charging real money for this. Enterprise money. “We just raised a seed round” money.

It would be funny if it wasn’t actively poisoning the well for those of us actually trying to build things that work.

Congratulations, You Built a Prompt. That’s Not a System.

Let’s be brutally honest: If your entire application logic lives inside a single natural language prompt, you haven’t built an AI system. If your “architecture” is just an API key and a prayer, and your error-handling strategy is “the model usually gets it right,” you’ve built a vibes-based interface. That’s it.

Adding “You are an expert” to the top of your system message doesn’t make your tool enterprise-ready. It makes it fragile.

Real Builders Can Smell This From a Mile Away

There is a massive vocabulary gap between people shipping real software and the snake oil crowd.

When you talk to someone actually building, you hear about evaluation loops, retrieval grounding, latency, token economics, and observability. You hear about failure modes and what happens when the model inevitably goes off the rails.

When you talk to a salesman, you hear:

• “The model just figures it out.”
• “You’re overthinking the technical side.”
• “It’s basically autonomous.”
• “AI is just different now.” (My personal favorite—no explanation, just vibes.)

If your technical explanation sounds more like “use the force” than “here is the data flow,” you aren’t doing engineering. You’re doing improv.

Prompt Wrappers Are the New No-Code Grift

Most of these “platforms” follow the same pathetic blueprint: a text box, an API call to OpenAI, and a monthly fee. They have no proprietary data, no domain modeling, no guardrails, and zero security story.

It’s a demo pretending to be a platform. Selling this as “AI infrastructure” is just the 2026 version of selling miracle tonics out of the back of a wagon. Different buzzwords, same energy.

This Is Why Leaders Are Getting Burned

The real damage happens when these tools inevitably fail. When they hallucinate confidently, leak sensitive data, or blow through a yearly token budget in a week, the “founders” are nowhere to be found.

The cleanup falls on the engineers who didn’t want the tool in the first place and the leaders who now (rightfully) distrust the entire category of technology. We end up with the worst possible takeaway: “AI doesn’t work.”

No. Bad engineering doesn’t work.

Real AI Work Is Boring, Hard, and Unsexy

The snake oil crowd hates the truth: real AI work is slow and uncomfortable. It involves saying “no” to features that aren’t ready. It’s about:

• Designing retrieval pipelines that don’t lie.
• Measuring accuracy with math instead of “feelings.”
• Managing tokens like real currency.
• Planning for failure, because in non-deterministic systems, failure is a guarantee.

If someone hasn’t talked to you about trade-offs, they haven’t built anything that matters.

The 30-Second Test

Here is how you cut through the noise: If removing ChatGPT collapses your entire product, you don’t have a product. You have a resale business.

Real systems survive model swaps. They get safer over time. They are significantly harder to build than they look in a Twitter demo. Snake oil depends on magic; engineering depends on constraints.

Final Thought

We don’t need more AI tools. We need fewer people pretending that prompts are platforms.

If you’re selling a system message at a premium, real engineers can tell. They’re just being polite to your face. But if you want to talk about how to actually build—with architecture, evaluation, and a plan for when things go sideways—send me an email.

No wizard cosplay. Just engineering.