Field notes from shipping AI

Before you build an agent, it’s worth asking whether the bottleneck is the model — or the broken process around it. Usually it’s the process.

A demo proves an agent can work once. Production means it works on the thousandth strange input, at 3am, when nobody’s watching. Here’s the gap between the two.

A system you can’t run without us isn’t an asset — it’s a dependency. We’d rather build something you own outright.

Long timelines hide risk. Short ones surface it. Here’s how a six-week engagement stays honest from kickoff to launch.

“We added AI” can mean a thin wrapper around a chat box, or a system that does real work end to end. The difference matters more than the label.

Stuffing everything into the prompt feels like memory, but it isn’t. Real systems decide what to retrieve, when, and what to forget — here’s how we think about it.