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.

5 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

FIELD NOTE9 min · 2026-07-22

How to measure AI ROI without lying to your board.

Most AI ROI decks measure enthusiasm. Here is the baseline-first method we use on engagements: one workflow, one metric, cost line next to benefit line, reported monthly.

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ANALYSIS10 min · 2026-07-08

Gartner says 40% of agentic projects get cancelled. Here is the pattern.

Cancelled agentic projects are rarely killed by the model. They are killed by unscoped ambition, no owner, no evals, no cost ceiling, and a use case that never needed an agent.

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May 2026

PLAYBOOK8 min · 2026-05-27

AI governance for companies without a governance department.

Enterprise AI governance frameworks are unusable at 200 people. Here is the one-page version we install: data boundaries, approved models, logs, review gates, named owner.

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March 2026

PLAYBOOK9 min · 2026-03-25

Treat tokens like cloud spend, or the invoice will teach you.

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.

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January 2026

ANALYSIS10 min · 2026-01-14

Every AI failure stat measures a different thing. Here is the scoreboard.

MIT says 95%, Gartner says 40%, vendor decks say 88%. They measure different things. What each stat counts, and the five gaps that separate shipped from shelved.

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