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.
18 of 71 field notes · 2026 archive
What to require at the end of an automation project: inventory, owned credentials, written rules, health signals, a rehearsed runbook and test evidence.
A proposed workflow for lease options and notice windows: dates stored as sourced computations, amendment checks, notice requirements and escalating reminders.
A CRM migration plan built on reconciliation: scoped objects, field maps by meaning, source IDs, people-led duplicate merges, rehearsal loads and sample checks.
A proposed workflow for Columbus benchmarking: meter inventory, sourced bill data, consistency checks and a review package before Portfolio Manager submission.
Plan a CRM integration field by field: one owning system per value, sync direction, stable record IDs, deletion rules and visible sync failures.
How to measure an AI workflow by cost per accepted outcome, with rework, retries and operating effort included and compared with the previous process.
A proposed delivery-packet workflow that checks issued files against reviewed revisions, approvals and the transmittal so the package can be reconstructed.
A proposed portfolio reporting workflow that confirms which properties, periods and source files are present before totals or narrative are produced.
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.
Model swaps stopped moving the needle. The gains now come from the harness around the model: durable state, checkpoints, retry policy, budget ceilings, and clean recovery.
A proposed order-change workflow that establishes the current accepted order, checks the affected systems and collects approval before applying the change.
A proposed accounts payable workflow that matches invoices against purchasing records and routes exceptions to people before any payment is authorized.
How to write n8n recovery steps operators can follow: alerts that point to a decision, failure classes, deliberate retries, preserved evidence and rehearsal.
A proposed transmittal workflow that reconciles documents, revisions, approvals and recipients into a reviewable packet before distribution.
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.
Nobody plans an AI budget overrun. They just never set a ceiling. Per-task budgets, tiered routing, context hygiene, caching, and one dashboard with a named owner.
Design a usable review queue with named approvers, exact action previews, expiry, escalation, and execution receipts.
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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