Field notes

Ideas for building AI that holds up beyond the demo.

Essays on practical AI systems, evaluation, workflow design, and the human decisions around them. Published roughly monthly, when there is something useful to add.

Cadence

About one essay a month

Latest writing

03 essays

01AI AdoptionAugust 26, 20267 min readAI is the hammer, not the blacksmithA practical guide to using AI at work without outsourcing verification, judgment, or responsibility to the tool.AI workflowsHuman judgmentResponsible AI

02Applied AIAugust 25, 20266 min readThe response is not the productA practical evaluation loop for building AI workflows people can understand, trust, and use—without mistaking a polished model output for a reliable system.AI evaluationWorkflow designHuman review

03AI EvaluationJuly 24, 20267 min readThe data was correct. It was just from 1947.How I traced a plausible-but-stale result through retrieval and caching, fixed the data contract, and made future failures easier to investigate.Data validationAI workflowsObservability