Building & Product

How do founders ship their first AI feature (APIs, wrappers, RAG in plain terms)?

Your first AI feature is usually one API call: send the model your instructions plus the user's input, get text or structured JSON back, and wrap it in your existing UI. RAG means fetching your own data (docs, tickets, listings) and pasting the relevant bits into the prompt so the model answers from your facts. If the output is a choice (tag, route, score), a decision model like OpenAI's Decisions API or Jev returns it with a probability. Ship a thin version in days with the OpenAI or Claude API and Vercel's AI SDK, then iterate on prompts before anything fancier.

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On the AI map, 29 October 2026 Frontier models Open-weight models Decision models

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Retrieval-Augmented Generation

More in AI in Your Product

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