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.

3 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

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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SECURITY9 min · 2026-05-13

Prompt injection is an access-control problem.

Filtering instructions out of untrusted text is a losing game. The defenses that hold are boring: least-privilege tools, typed arguments, allowlists, and approval on writes.

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February 2026

SECURITY10 min · 2026-02-25

The MCP server security checklist we run before handoff.

Every MCP server ships two products at once: the tools and the attack surface. Fourteen checks on auth, scoping, tenancy, argument validation, and audit trails.

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