Field notes
Production AI patterns we ship every week. Stuck pilots, MCP hardening, eval suites, agent orchestration, cost control. Written by Alex Cinovoj, Founder & CTO, TechTide AI · CTO & Co-Founder, CPG Playbook. No vendor pitches, no recycled blog posts.
13 of 71 field notes · 2026 archive
How to move an AI workflow from full human review to sampling: written criteria, reviewer agreement, per-risk groups, staged reductions and reset triggers.
A proposed docketing workflow: AI extracts trigger events and periods with source quotes, code computes dates, and a docketing reviewer confirms each entry.
A proposed internal legal knowledge search that starts with access tests: partial access, lost access, team changes and cached answers.
An illustrative planning sequence: review the pilot, address its foundations, and decide whether the acceptance evidence supports release.
How to write AI pilot acceptance criteria before the demo: observable behavior, the evidence that checks it, and what happens when the workflow cannot finish.
A proposed field-report workflow that turns photos, notes and forms into a reviewable draft, keeping who observed what and leaving conclusions to engineers.
A proposed lease abstraction workflow where every extracted field carries its source passage, document version and open interpretation questions.
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.
How to scope a first Claude MCP integration around read-only questions: narrow tools, the user's own access, source links, freshness and an evaluation set.
A proposed review queue for legal billing narratives that flags missing context and asks precise questions, without inventing work or changing time.
Debugging an agent from a chat transcript is guesswork. Log the full run as a trace, keep cost and latency on the same timeline, and alert on tool-level failures.
A proposed purchasing worksheet that keeps quote differences, source locations and clarification questions visible instead of ranking incomplete quotes.
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.
Buying guides on alexcinovoj.com and engineering notes on alexcinovoj.dev, published alongside these field notes.
Companion reading
How to read an implementation quote: process clarity, data preparation, integrations, review and recovery, and operating ownership. A proposed evaluation method, not a price list.
Published October 29, 2026 · January 2026 collection
A decision guide for choosing between software you already own, an extension and a custom integration, with exit paths and a bounded trial before expanding. The examples are hypothetical.
Published October 29, 2026 · February 2026 collection
A procurement method that asks every supplier the same questions about scope, working evidence, acceptance criteria, security boundaries and handoff. It does not rank agencies.
Published October 29, 2026 · February 2026 collection
A walkthrough of ClawKeeper's deterministic agent policy, tenant checks and payment approval gate, based on seven synthetic policy tests run at one inspected revision, with its known trust boundaries.
Published October 29, 2026 · January–March 2026 collection
A source-code reading of CipherClaw's trace graph, root-cause heuristics and breakpoints at one inspected revision, with its implementation limits. The review did not run the test suite.
Published October 29, 2026 · January–March 2026 collection
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