Insights

Field notes on production AI

Hard-won lessons from building, evaluating and operating RAG systems, agents and generative pipelines. No hype — just what works when real users depend on it.

Human-in-the-Loop: Where Automation Should Stop

Full autonomy is rarely the goal. We share the decision framework we use to place humans exactly where they add the most safety and value — and nowhere else.

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Cost, Latency & Quality: The Three-Body Problem of LLM Apps

You can optimise for any two, but the third always pushes back. Here is how we reason about the trade-offs and tune LLM apps that stay fast, cheap and good enough.

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Prompt Engineering Is Software Engineering Now

Prompts are code: they need version control, tests, reviews and CI. We explain how to treat them that way before they quietly become your biggest source of production risk.

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Vector Databases in 2023: Choosing the Right Store for RAG

Pgvector, Qdrant, or a managed service? We cut through the benchmark noise with the questions that actually determine which vector store fits your workload.

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Building Multi-Agent Systems: Orchestration Patterns We Trust

When one agent isn't enough, coordination becomes the hard part. These are the orchestration patterns that survived contact with production for us.

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Guardrails for Generative AI: Safety, Brand & Compliance

A practical, layered approach to keeping generative systems on-brand, on-policy and out of trouble — without smothering the quality that made them worth building.

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Evaluating LLM Applications: Metrics That Matter in Production

Vibe checks don't scale. We break down the offline and online metrics that actually predict whether your LLM feature is helping or hurting real users.

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From Chatbot to Agent: Designing Tool-Using AI That Doesn't Go Rogue

Giving a model tools changes everything about your risk surface. Here is how we design tool-using agents that are capable, bounded and auditable.

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Chunking Strategies That Actually Improve Retrieval Quality

Chunking is the most under-rated lever in RAG. We compare the strategies we reach for and explain how to pick one from the structure of your own documents.

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Why RAG Beats Fine-Tuning for Most Enterprise Knowledge Problems

Fine-tuning is seductive and usually the wrong first move. We lay out why retrieval wins for knowledge work, and the narrow cases where fine-tuning still earns its keep.

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We publish practical write-ups on production AI a few times a month. Want them first — or want to talk through a problem of your own?