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

August 2026

COMPARISON10 min · 2026-08-01

Claude Code vs GitHub Copilot: which one belongs in your stack.

Copilot optimizes for keystrokes, Claude Code optimizes for tasks. A production comparison across agentic work, MCP tool access, review workflow, cost control, and governance.

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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.

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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.

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January 2026

EXPLAINER10 min · 2026-01-28

Context engineering is the job now.

The prompt is the smallest part. Production quality comes from context assembly: retrieval scope, ordering, compaction, tool results, and a hard token budget.

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