> Boss kept suggesting shoving AI into features, and I kept pointing out we could make the features better with less effort using simple heuristics in a few lines of code

there are definitely useful applications for end user features, but a lot of this is ordered from on-high top-down and product managers need to appease them...

... And the people at the top are only asking for it because it sounds really good to investors and shareholders. "Powered by AI" sounds way fancier and harder to replace than "power by simple string searches and other heuristics"