Traditional software fails loudly. A server crashes. A database goes down. An exception gets thrown. You get paged.

AI systems fail quietly. The API returns 200 OK. The response looks grammatically correct. But the answer is completely wrong.

Traditional failure:  500 Internal Server Error  → Alert fires → You fix it
AI failure:           200 OK + confident nonsense → No alert → Users lose trust

This is the fundamental difference. AI ops exists because the old playbook doesn't catch the new failure modes.