Tagged decision
7 pieces
- · 7 min read
Tracker or Model: The Wearable Fork
Two wearables can look identical and be different products. One computes a quantity the sensing can actually resolve; the other infers a quantity it cannot, and covers the gap with a model. The fork is decided when the sensing is chosen, months before there is data, and it determines what you are allowed to claim.
- · 6 min read
Retrieval or Fine-Tuning: How to Actually Decide
The decision is not about quality and it is not close. Retrieval changes what the model knows; fine-tuning changes how it behaves. Almost every team asking this question has a knowledge problem and is being sold a behaviour solution, and the tell is whether the right answer changes when your documents change.
- · 7 min read
Model Confidence or Independent Verification
A confidence threshold is the cheapest thing that looks like a safety control, and it fails in the one place you need it: models are most confident on inputs they have never seen. The decision is not what threshold to set, it is whether your task has a cheap grounded check, because that determines whether verification is available at all.
- · 7 min read
Human in the Loop or Safe State: Choosing Your Fallback
When a system cannot proceed safely, it has two options: hand the decision to a person, or take a defined safe action itself. Which one is correct is decided by whether a person is reachable inside the time the situation allows, and that single test resolves most of the argument.
- · 6 min read
Edge or Cloud Inference: A Decision Table
This is usually argued on latency and cost, which are the two least decisive inputs. The questions that actually settle it are whether the system must work with no connectivity, whether the data can legally or contractually leave, and whether you can reach the device to fix what you got wrong.
- · 6 min read
Durable Execution, Idempotency, or Both
A workflow engine guarantees your process resumes. It does not guarantee your side effect happened once. Those are different properties solving different halves of the same failure, and buying the first while assuming it delivers the second is the most common way a durable system still double-charges someone.
- · 7 min read
Build or Buy Your Agent Infrastructure
Almost every agent platform sells the part that is easy and leaves you the part that is hard. The loop, the tool dispatch, and the trace viewer are commodity. Whether your system knows it made progress, what it does when it gives up, and what stops a call tree are yours regardless of what you buy.