As I continue learning Forward Deployed Engineering and Generative AI, I am beginning to look at AI from a software engineer's perspective.

My third lecture focused on a distinction that seems simple at first:

An LLM is not the same thing as a GenAI application.

An LLM provides language capabilities. But a real application needs software around the model to make those capabilities useful.

The model is only one part of the system

Imagine a customer support team wants to summarize incoming support tickets.

The LLM can generate a summary. But someone still needs to build the system that receives the ticket, sends the right information to the model, handles the response, and makes that result available to the support team.

The overall workflow might look like this:

Support Ticket ↓ Backend Application ↓ LLM Provider API ↓ Generated Summary ↓ Backend Application ↓ Support Team

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The model is important, but it is only one component in the workflow.

What if the…