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

July 2026

EXPLAINER9 min · 2026-07-01

MCP vs A2A: two protocols, two different jobs.

MCP is vertical, model to tools. A2A is horizontal, agent to agent. Most teams need the first and adopt the second too early. The decision rule, with failure modes.

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June 2026

ANALYSIS10 min · 2026-06-17

The harness matters more than the model now.

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.

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May 2026

ANALYSIS10 min · 2026-05-06

The only three orchestration patterns that survive contact with production.

Swarms demo well and page you at 2am. Three orchestration patterns survive real traffic, and the choice is decided by failure isolation, not elegance.

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March 2026

ANALYSIS9 min · 2026-03-11

You probably do not need the framework.

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.

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