Like everything in this stupid, hype-driven AI industry, it's always the "easy" 80% that is done; the actually-difficult final 20% is always waved off with vague future promises.
now, they open discussions with "you cant imagine how many tokens I burnt yesterday to create X" and then showing a widget with 5 buttons that runs within Claude/Browser without any real data or connection to the rest of any parts of the company :-D
Yes, it was always possible for a PM to get a VP excited about a project and then lead to some mandate. But at least then I got to do a time estimate and they believed me. Today they can create a prototype to show to the VP so that both of them conclude that the project isn't actually very hard and my estimate of two engineers and four months gets rejected because "the prototype is 80% of the way there and it only took two days" even though the prototype is running locally on my PM's machine and is using fake data when we don't have easy access to the real data.