AI suffers from difficulties and hallucinations, but you don't have to! Join us for the inside scoop on Pulumi’s AI product development story and follow our journey from hackathon demo, to production, and beyond. See how we continue to drive progress into the future as we bring you lessons learned from a year of engineering our way to synthetically generated IaC success. Building on the foundational development and adoption of a test-driven development workflow, we introduce an AI application benchmark design, share our initial results, and give you a step by step roadmap recounting the road to realizing 3x accuracy improvements and reducing our benchmark failure rate from 70% to 26% today. In this talk, we share our failure classification and analysis strategy and present our framework for understanding intervention techniques in Generative AI application optimization. Enjoy our story and leave with fundamental principles and techniques to improve your own AI development practices.