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.
21 of 71 field notes · 2026 archive
Release AI agent write actions in stages: proposals, approved execution with receipts, narrow automatic actions, server-side limits and evidence to advance.
A proposed RMA process: order matching, quoted return terms, safe evidence uploads, separated complaints and return decisions made by authorized staff.
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 business credit workflow: completeness checks, sourced financial figures, organized references, analyst-owned decisions and approved notices.
A proposed professional services workflow: transcript-quoted action items, unclear owners left unclear, scope flags and nothing sent to a client unreviewed.
A proposed engagement letter workflow: approved templates, facts from confirmed intake, visible gaps, no generated fee terms and a recorded lawyer approval.
Move an n8n integration from prototype to production: business-owned credentials, separate environments, authenticated webhooks, error workflows and owners.
A proposed internal legal knowledge search that starts with access tests: partial access, lost access, team changes and cached answers.
A proposed matter-closeout workflow that reconciles the checklist across systems and reviews access before anything changes, under the firm's own rules.
How to scope a first Claude MCP integration around read-only questions: narrow tools, the user's own access, source links, freshness and an evaluation set.
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.
A proposed client reporting workflow that drafts status reports from bounded project evidence and leaves missing facts visible for the delivery lead.
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.
A proposed purchasing worksheet that keeps quote differences, source locations and clarification questions visible instead of ranking incomplete quotes.
A proposed maintenance routing workflow that keeps the tenant's original words, applies the property's escalation rules and shows uncertain cases to a person.
A proposed legal document request workflow: one record per requested item, original files kept, missing items visible, and counsel deciding sufficiency.
A practical data-flow review for client-service teams adopting AI: access, retrieval, logging, retention, and deletion.
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.
A proposed onboarding workflow connecting approved scope, client inputs, access requests, and delivery readiness without inventing commitments.
A proposed workflow for transaction document intake, version tracking, missing-item review, and controlled reminders.
A proposed legal intake workflow with source-linked facts, conflict-review routing, confidential data boundaries, and human approval.
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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