Field notes
Short technical positions drawn from prior operating experience, current research, reference architecture, and explicitly identified lab work.
Published
Spend spikes are frequently caused not by price changes but by mechanical work — extraction, classification, formatting — being sent down the route reserved for high-consequence work, because no route was ever chosen deliberately.
When policy exists in a wiki, a PDF and someone's inbox, retrieval will faithfully surface whichever one it finds. Governance is not paperwork; it is the mechanism that makes an answer defensible.
A fixed question set with a scoring method turns upgrade decisions into measurements. Without one, the loudest stakeholder's anecdote tends to become the evaluation suite.
Providers more often get slower, terser, or subtly worse than they go dark. Monitoring built only for availability can report green through most of an incident.
Owned hardware may reduce marginal cost for evaluated mechanical workloads, subject to quality, latency, capacity, hardware and energy requirements. It also introduces capacity planning, patching, lifecycle and on-call. Both belong in the same decision record.
Seat licenses are provisioned by procurement and often abandoned by humans. Before negotiating a rate, measure who touched the tool last month — utilization is usually the number with leverage in it.
These notes are general engineering commentary, not advice about a specific environment. Anything that touches money, safety or compliance should be evaluated against your own architecture and constraints.
Planned
These are titles with a thesis behind them and no article yet. They are listed so the publication order is visible, not to pad the page.
AI Looks New Until You Diagram the Traffic
Class of Service for AI Workloads
From Salesforce, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Zendesk, and Git to OKF
Price per Token Is the Wrong Denominator
An OKF Bundle Is a Knowledge Contract, Not an Agent Runtime
Why Model Handoffs Need a Continuity Contract
Good. Those are the most useful calls we take.