The journal
Field notes & notes
Build stories from real engagements, and shorter reflections along the way — the decisions, the dead ends, and the judgment calls behind production AI and data systems. Written as a journal: deliberately general about clients, honest about what actually happened. For the shorter, structured versions, see the case studies.
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Field note · Production AI
Two paths to a trustworthy answer
How we gave business users plain-English access to a hundred-table warehouse — by splitting the system by cost-of-wrong: an exploratory path where the user verifies the answer, and a deterministic path built on vetted queries.
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Field note · Production AI
Optimise the reviewer, not the robot
A lawyer reviews everything regardless — so the win was never machine autonomy. How a legal document-review system reached production by making the human's review effortless, and choosing the simpler architecture every time.
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Field note · Cloud & security architecture
The layer underneath the data
Five-plus siloed warehouses became one governed platform. We owned what sat underneath and around the data — hosting, security, governance, cross-cloud wiring — and how the architectural know-how stayed in-house when the build was done.
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Field note · Production AI
Build the engine, not the feature
An R&D notebook prototype became a production knowledge engine. The defining decision was refusing to build a point tool — the same reusable core went on to draft tender responses and generate slide decks.