This is a retrospective series, written in 2026, looking back at about two years of hands-on applied AI projects and what changed in AI along the way. Between late 2024 and mid-2026, I built production systems that used structured extraction, multi-agent orchestration, voice AI, and evaluation frameworks—technologies that matured rapidly during that window. These posts revisit those projects with the benefit of hindsight, documenting what worked, what didn't, and how the tools evolved.