AI Is Transforming Development - Reliability Still Depends on Human Operators

By Justin Downes, SEO Engineer

AI has made it dramatically easier to produce software that looks finished. Teams can generate features faster, refactor aggressively, and ship updates at a pace that would have felt unrealistic a few years ago. In many categories, that acceleration is enough to win.

Real-time web calling is different.

In a recent discussion with Conrad De Wet, CEO of Siperb.com, one theme came through clearly: the "last mile" of browser calling is not solved by speed. "AI makes it cheaper to produce code," he said. "But browser calling isn't won by code volume. It's won by what happens when calls hit the real world-unreliable networks, NAT and firewall behaviour, media negotiation edge cases, and what you do when something breaks at scale."

Why real-time calling exposes the gap between demo and service

A browser call can appear flawless in a controlled environment and still fail in production for reasons that are intermittent, environmental, and user-specific. Corporate firewalls behave differently from home broadband. VPNs and captive portals change routes. Browsers update media stacks. Permissions and devices vary. These are not edge cases-they are the default conditions of modern usage.

Even before media is established, connectivity can be fragile. NAT traversal constraints mean many sessions rely on STUN and TURN infrastructure to establish viable paths. When direct routes fail, the quality of fallback behaviour often determines whether the user experiences a brief recovery or a hard failure.

AI helps build faster - humans keep it running

AI can assist with code generation and analysis, but reliability in communications is operational. It requires disciplined monitoring, predictable diagnostics, and recovery paths that don't turn a call failure into a dead end. When issues arise, teams need to answer practical questions quickly: did signalling succeed, did media negotiate correctly, was routing blocked, or did the environment change mid-session?

This is where skilled technicians and production engineering still matter. They design for variability, instrument what matters, and build systems that can explain failure modes clearly. As De Wet put it: "A lot of systems work until they're asked to work reliably. In communications, reliability isn't an enhancement-it's the baseline."

The 2026 buying question: "Can you prove it?"

As AI increases the number of "working" implementations on the market, buyers are shifting from feature checklists to evidence. They want proof of consistent connection rates, time-to-connect, and stability under packet loss and jitter. They also want confidence that when failures occur-and they will-there's visibility and a clear path to recovery.

AI will keep raising the pace of shipping. The more meaningful separation in real-time web calling will be between products that merely demonstrate calling and services that can operate it dependably.

About Siperb
Siperb provides browser-based WebRTC calling and SIP interoperability for businesses that need reliable voice in real network conditions. More information: https://siperb.com/

Siperb
73 De Villiers Way, Glen Cairn, Cape Town, 7975
Justin Downes
+27 78 470 4675

Siperb is a browser-based WebRTC calling platform focused on making real-time voice work reliably in real network conditions. The company helps organisations connect web calling to existing SIP and telephony environments, enabling click-to-call, customer service voice, and internal communications without replacing core infrastructure. Siperb's work centres on operational reliability: handling NAT and firewall constraints, supporting stable media negotiation, and providing practical visibility into call setup and quality issues so teams can diagnose failures quickly. Led by CEO Conrad De Wet, Siperb prioritises production-grade engineering and dependable performance over "demo-only" success, helping customers operate browser calling as a service rather than a feature. More information: https://siperb.com/

This release was published on openPR.