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.
8 of 71 field notes · 2026 archive
Questions to ask before hiring a workflow or AI automation consultant: account ownership, scope, testing, failure handling, AI decisions, pricing and handoff.
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 baseline-first measurement method: one workflow, consistent definitions, and operating costs reported alongside the measured benefit.
A forecast is not an individual diagnosis. Review ownership, costs, tests, expectations, and use-case fit against the project's evidence.
A proposed renewal packet that separates delivered, accepted, client-reported and measured results from open issues, without a generated success story.
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.
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.
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.
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
Service areas
Columbus metro in person. Remote across the US, Canada and the EU.
© 2026 TechTide AI LLC. Columbus, Ohio.
