Field Notes

What I’ve learned shipping AI into production.

Working notes from the build, not the brochure. Each piece is narrative, and each one is written to leave you with something you can use.

01

Lead note

4 min readDraft

The month we shipped nothing and every light stayed green

For a month, every merge to this site built clean, passed checks, and never reached production. Nobody noticed, because the pipeline only lied at the very last step.

Publication ledger

Notes from the operating edge.

Postmortems, governance decisions, and implementation lessons from building systems people are expected to trust.

3 min readDraft

The receipt that was too good to be real

Evidence · Agents · Trust

Takeaway

An evidence system is only worth something if a failing number can survive publication.

3 min readDraft

The document that overruled me

Design · Governance · Process

Takeaway

Written design law beats in-session taste, and a wrong turn can still leave useful parts behind.

4 min readDraft

Five agents, one frozen file

Agents · Orchestration · Process

Takeaway

Parallel agents don’t need smarter models. They need disjoint scopes, a frozen shared file, and one written brief.

4 min read

The demo that never shipped

Agents · Production · Governance

Takeaway

Four questions that separate a demo from something you can actually deploy.

4 min read

I build the guardrails first

Governance · Agents · Reliability

Takeaway

Why I design the guardrails before the first prompt, and what it actually buys me.