Case Study: 80% of Report Agent Work Was Data Pipelines, Not AI

AmbassadorSad3889 · reddit · 2026-08-22

A developer's retrospective on building an AI report generator reveals that 80% of the effort went into data cleaning and normalization, not prompting. The project also shifted to fixed templates for consistency instead of letting the AI design layouts. The advice is to prioritize deterministic templating over generative freedom in similar builds.

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