Field notes

Implementation playbooks from the field.

Production AI patterns we ship every week. Stuck pilots, MCP hardening, eval suites, agent orchestration, cost control. Written by Alex Cinovoj, Founder and CTO of TechTide AI. No vendor pitches, no recycled blog posts.

4 of 22 field notes · 2026 archive

All topics Agents Coding agents Cost control Delivery Evals Governance Human in the loop MCP Model choice Observability Orchestration Retrieval ROI Security

July 2026

FIELD NOTE9 min · 2026-07-22

How to measure AI ROI without lying to your board.

Most AI ROI decks measure enthusiasm. Here is the baseline-first method we use on engagements: one workflow, one metric, cost line next to benefit line, reported monthly.

Read field note →

June 2026

PLAYBOOK9 min · 2026-06-03

Pick a model with your own workload, not a leaderboard.

Leaderboards measure someone else's problem. Build a 50-task set from your own traffic, score it blind, price it per task, then keep the swap cheap.

Read field note →

May 2026

EXPLAINER9 min · 2026-05-20

RAG is not dead. Bad retrieval is.

Every long-context release restarts the RAG obituary. Retrieval still wins on cost, freshness, permissions, and citation. The five fixes that rescue a weak pipeline.

Read field note →

March 2026

PLAYBOOK9 min · 2026-03-25

Treat tokens like cloud spend, or the invoice will teach you.

Nobody plans an AI budget overrun. They just never set a ceiling. Per-task budgets, tiered routing, context hygiene, caching, and one dashboard with a named owner.

Read field note →

Ship the next version of your AI system

Start with the $1,000 AI Audit