Field notes
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.
11 of 22 field notes · 2026 archive
Copilot optimizes for keystrokes, Claude Code optimizes for tasks. A production comparison across agentic work, MCP tool access, review workflow, cost control, and governance.
AI-generated prototypes are the cheapest product research available. The failure is promoting one to production without tests, types, auth, or an owner. The handoff checklist we use.
Cancelled agentic projects are rarely killed by the model. They are killed by unscoped ambition, no owner, no evals, no cost ceiling, and a use case that never needed an agent.
A field-tested 21-day playbook: triage in week one, harden in week two, ship one workflow to production by day 21. The exact plan TechTide AI runs on Workflow Rescue engagements.
Six months after the first AI feature ships, the debt shows up as prompt sprawl, untyped tools, no eval baseline, and nobody able to say what changed. How we pay it down.
The agent does not need to be right every time. It needs to know when it is out of depth. Four escalation triggers, plus the handoff payload that makes a human fast.
Swarms demo well and page you at 2am. Three orchestration patterns survive real traffic, and the choice is decided by failure isolation, not elegance.
Fourteen nodes in a state graph to answer refund questions. Size the stack to the problem: one loop, typed tools, a log, and only then a framework.
Every MCP server ships two products at once: the tools and the attack surface. Fourteen checks on auth, scoping, tenancy, argument validation, and audit trails.
No eval suite means every change is a vibe. Five days: harvest real tasks, write assertions, set the pass bar, wire CI, then gate deploys on it.
MIT says 95%, Gartner says 40%, vendor decks say 88%. They measure different things. What each stat counts, and the five gaps that separate shipped from shelved.
© 2026 TechTide AI LLC. Columbus, Ohio.