Tagged buyer-guide
8 pieces
- · 7 min read
Your Green Dashboard Is Not Evidence
Monitoring answers whether the system is running. Evaluation answers whether it is right. Those are two different dials and almost every organisation has built only the first, which is why the honest sentence after an incident is not that monitoring failed but that nothing was ever watching the thing that broke.
- · 7 min read
When Not to Ship an Autonomous Agent
There is a test that decides it, and it is not about model quality. If you cannot compute, in code, a number that tells you whether the task is closer to done, you cannot build a reliable agent for it yet. The honest move is a bounded assistant with a human terminal state, which is not a lesser product. It is the same capability with the failure mode removed.
- · 8 min read
What It Costs to Fix a Failing AI System
Nobody in this field answers the cost question straight, so here it is. The price is not set by your system's complexity, it is set by which of four diagnoses you land on, and the four are separated by more than an order of magnitude. Any quote produced before the diagnosis is a quote for the most expensive branch, because that is the only one you can price without looking.
- · 7 min read
What a Two-Week Diagnostic Should Deliver
A diagnostic is not a discovery phase, an architecture review, or a slide deck of observations. It is a finding with evidence attached, a ranked list of what else is wrong, and a scoped fix you could hand to a different vendor. If the deliverable cannot be handed to someone else, it was a sales document.
- · 7 min read
Signs the Failure Is in the Seams, Not the Model
Every component passes its own tests. Every team's investigation ends politely at their boundary. The system does not work. Five signs tell you the failure lives between components rather than inside one, and they matter because a seam failure bought as a component engagement is money spent on the wrong question.
- · 7 min read
Questions to Ask Before Hiring Anyone to Fix Your RAG System
Seven questions, in the order that sorts candidates fastest. The first three separate people who have run a retrieval system in production from people who have read about one, and the last one beats any pitch, because someone who has done this work can tell you exactly where their approach falls down.
- · 7 min read
How to Tell Your Vendor Is Aiming at the Wrong Thing
The expensive failure is almost never a vendor who cannot execute. It is a competent team executing precisely, on the wrong component. That is much harder to detect, because everything looks like progress, and there are four tells that show up before any code does.
- · 7 min read
Five Questions for Your Next AI Design Review
You should not have to read a trace to know whether an agent is safe to ship. Five questions, none of them technical, each with a right answer and a recognisable wrong one. They take ten minutes and they find the failure modes that pass every demo, because the failures live in what the system does when it does not succeed.