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 23 field notes · 2026 archive

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

June 2026

FIELD NOTE9 min · 2026-06-29

How to fix a stuck Claude pilot in 21 days.

A field-tested playbook: triage, harden, and ship one workflow to production. The sequence AI Production Systems follows once a decision justifies moving forward.

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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.

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April 2026

PLAYBOOK9 min · 2026-04-22

If you cannot replay it, you cannot ship it.

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.

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February 2026

PLAYBOOK10 min · 2026-02-11

Build an agent eval suite in five days.

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.

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