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.
13 of 71 field notes · 2026 archive
A proposed handover workflow using a COBie-style structure: data needs per asset type, schedule matching, sourced attributes and owner-recorded acceptance.
A proposed workflow for lease options and notice windows: dates stored as sourced computations, amendment checks, notice requirements and escalating reminders.
Confidentiality questions for a law firm AI pilot: training, retention, access, ethical walls, output checks, data rules and exit, grounded in ABA guidance.
A proposed estoppel workflow for sales and refinancings: a sourced lease baseline, field-by-field comparison of returned certificates and recorded decisions.
A proposed submittal workflow: confirmed spec checklists, sourced completeness findings, original files intact and engineering judgment kept with reviewers.
A proposed internal legal knowledge search that starts with access tests: partial access, lost access, team changes and cached answers.
A proposed lease abstraction workflow where every extracted field carries its source passage, document version and open interpretation questions.
A proposed review-comment workflow that suggests duplicate groups while keeping every original comment, its revision and an authorized closure decision.
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.
A practical data-flow review for client-service teams adopting AI: access, retrieval, logging, retention, and deletion.
A proposed workflow for collecting change evidence, checking baselines, routing impact reviews, and preserving engineering approval boundaries.
The prompt is the smallest part. Production quality comes from context assembly: retrieval scope, ordering, compaction, tool results, and a hard token budget.
A proposed RFI intake workflow that preserves drawing references, routes questions, and keeps contractual decisions with authorized reviewers.
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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