Field Notes

Field notes on what breaks when AI, automation, and infrastructure changes leave the prototype stage and enter real organizations.

May 2026

Operational AI Is Primarily a Governance Problem

The risky moment is not the demo. It is when a useful AI system enters daily work before ownership, review, evidence, and rollback exist.

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October 2025

The Hidden Cost of Probabilistic Infrastructure

The cloud bill is visible. The quieter cost is the evidence, monitoring, and coordination needed when an AI workflow is available but wrong.

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March 2025

AI Governance Without Operational Reality Is Theater

Governance only matters when it leaves the slide deck and changes workflow behavior: review, access, logging, release discipline, escalation, and rollback.

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September 2024

Why Internal Knowledge Systems Usually Fail

Retrieval can find a document. It cannot decide whether the organization still believes it without ownership, permissions, lifecycle, and correction paths.

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February 2024

AI Is Creating a New Class of Operational Debt

AI debt gathers outside the codebase: prompts, retrieval sources, vendor settings, and review habits that nobody owns once the pilot becomes infrastructure.

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June 2023

Reliability Engineering for AI Systems

A model score can look clean in the lab while operators inherit the failure. Reliability lives in boundaries, evidence, fallback, and recovery.

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November 2021

The Future of Technical Work Is Coordination

AI has not repealed Conway's Law. The durable work is coordinating people, systems, data, controls, vendors, and decisions around uncertain automation.

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