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.
6 of 22 field notes · 2026 archive
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.
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.
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.
Enterprise AI governance frameworks are unusable at 200 people. Here is the one-page version we install: data boundaries, approved models, logs, review gates, named owner.
Teams argue about whether the agent should be autonomous. Wrong unit. Set autonomy per action, using reversibility and blast radius, and earn each step up with evidence.
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.