Notes
Field notes from production automation
Not a blog — a small collection of things I learned the hard way, written the same way I write my runbooks: plain, specific, and honest about what went wrong. If you're deciding whether to trust me with your systems, these tell you more than any pitch.
The API said the call didn't exist
An attribution pipeline was quietly losing exactly the phone calls it existed to track — while every health check stayed green. What silent failure looks like, how it got diagnosed, and the design rule it left behind.
When I tell clients not to automate
Some processes aren't worth automating yet, and a few should never be. The checklist I run before taking a project — including the answers that mean "keep your money."
AI that isn't allowed to make things up
How I wire LLMs into business systems so the model can narrate but never invent: rules for the boring 80%, AI for the ambiguous 20%, and numbers that only ever come from real queries.