Tagged enterprise-software
5 pieces
- · 8 min read
The Third Option: Large Integrator, Narrow Specialist, or One Accountable Owner
An organisation with a hard cross-layer production problem weighs four options, and each is structurally wrong for it in a different way. The large integrator is broad and shallow with hand-offs at every seam. The narrow specialist is deep in one layer and hands off at its edge. The AI vendor sells the five percent. Staffing gives you hands without an owner. This is what the fifth option is and when it is not the answer.
- · 8 min read
Rebuild or Repair? How to Tell Before You Approve Six Months
Two contractors quoted four and six months to rebuild a model. The actual fix took five days and was not the model. The decision between rebuilding and repairing is not a judgement call, it is a diagnosis you can run in an afternoon, and running it first is the difference between a five-day fix and six figures spent reproducing the same failure.
- · 7 min read
Your Agent Is Missing a State: Done, Gave Up, Killed
Chess has a draw, which is not a loss. A solver returns unknown, which means it ran out of budget and not that no answer exists. A database names a deadlock victim so the transaction knows it was killed. Your agent has two states, done and killed, and when the cap trips the run must be filed as one of the two it has a name for, so it gets filed as done. Everything downstream believes it.
- · 7 min read
Shadow and Canary: Shipping an AI Change Without Betting the Business
Two unglamorous techniques between a change and everyone. Shadow runs the new version against real traffic without showing anyone the results, so you find out how it behaves on production inputs before a single user sees it. Canary releases it to a small fraction with an automatic undo. The alternative, which is what most teams do, is to flip it on for everyone and hope.
- · 11 min read
The Eighty Percent That Separates an AI Agent Demo From a Platform
Building the agents is about 20% of the work. The 80% that decides whether an agent survives production is the part everyone skips: reconciliation when systems disagree, confidence thresholds that return no answer instead of a wrong one, validation before any real action, and the cost and observability work. A better model does not touch any of it, and all of it is buildable today.