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.
6 of 71 field notes · 2026 archive
Move an n8n integration from prototype to production: business-owned credentials, separate environments, authenticated webhooks, error workflows and owners.
MCP is vertical, model to tools. A2A is horizontal, agent to agent. Choose based on whether you need tool access or coordination between independently operated agents. The decision rule, with failure modes.
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.
Swarms demo well and page you at 2am. Three orchestration patterns survive real traffic, and the choice is decided by failure isolation, not elegance.
How to write n8n recovery steps operators can follow: alerts that point to a decision, failure classes, deliberate retries, preserved evidence and rehearsal.
Fourteen nodes in a state graph to answer refund questions. Size the stack to the problem: one loop, typed tools, a log, and only then a framework.
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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