Field Notes
Practical observations on building real systems. Notes from the field.
Latest notes
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The AI spend control surface: a reference architecture for the invoice that can't surprise you
Two weeks ago we wrote about a single developer's coding agent that produced a $29,875 net Bedrock invoice from one session, most of it uncached tokens that sh…
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The $500M AI bill nobody can verify, and the governance gap that makes it plausible
Late last week, an AI consultant told Axios that one of their enterprise clients ran up roughly $500 million in a single month on Anthropic's Claude after neve…
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I didn't buy that a storm took down Azure. I was half right.
This morning a headline crossed my feed: a thunderstorm knocked out a Microsoft Azure region. My first reaction was skepticism. A hyperscale region is supposed…
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A year at AI speed
When I left my last security engineering role, I did not go straight back to a job. I built an intelligent multi-cloud management platform and took it through…
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Build it twice on purpose
Almost every founder I talk to lately has the same story. They had an idea, they opened one of the new AI app builders, and within a week they had something re…
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The first question after a CVE drops is "am I even running that?"
Last week a critical flaw in Ghost CMS, the publishing platform behind a lot of company blogs and newsrooms, got weaponized at scale. The bug is CVE-2026-26980…
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Your CI pipeline is an attack surface now
On May 18, an automated campaign codenamed Megalodon pushed 5,718 malicious commits to 5,561 GitHub repositories in roughly six hours. It did not exploit a cle…
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I set out to document our systems. The docs found bugs I didn't know we had.
We run a portfolio of products. Over time, every one of them accumulates the same quiet rot: documentation that no longer matches the code, a README written si…
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Two kinds of holes: what AI-built apps actually break on after the demo
There is a moment that almost every team building with an AI assistant runs into. The first few weeks feel like magic. You describe a feature, the code appears…
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Your AI language is your AI strategy
On May 19, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters told an investor day audience that the bank planned to reduce roughly 7,800 corporate-functions roles by 2030, m…
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Structure, not tactics: when a second attacker proves the first one was not a fluke
Two weeks ago we wrote about how to read a new entrant into your market: not as a snapshot of its current feature set, but as a trajectory shaped by its incent…
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Budget alerts are not a control surface: AI cost as production engineering discipline
On May 14, The Register covered a story that had been bouncing around Hacker News the day before. A developer was running a local coding-agent setup (Droid tal…
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AI doxxing is a design failure, not a bug
On May 13, MIT Technology Review published Eileen Guo's piece on a quiet pattern showing up across the public chatbot frontier: people are getting WhatsApp mes…
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AI is a channel now: making the GA4 AI Assistant row useful
On May 13, Google added a row to GA4 that did not exist the week before. Sessions arriving from recognized AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) now show up…
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Your cloud defaults are now the attack surface
In late April, Dark Reading covered a cloud-security incident that has stayed with us. An AWS environment was fully compromised in roughly eight minutes. No ze…
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Cloud waste hasn't moved in seven years. SMBs have nowhere to go.
The State of Cloud Waste 2026 puts the global cloud waste rate at 27 percent of cloud spend, against a global cloud bill of roughly $675 billion in 2025. Gross…
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Trajectory, not snapshot: how to read a new entrant before it eats your lunch
On May 4, Amazon launched Amazon Supply Chain Services and opened its full logistics portfolio (freight, distribution, fulfillment, parcel) to any business tha…
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AI's hidden tax: why 73% of executives are missing ROI, and how to land in the 27%
This week, Globalization Partners published its 2026 AI at Work Report, surveying 2,850 leaders across six markets. The headline: 73% of executives say at leas…
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Production-grade AI managers, not research experiments
In mid-April, a San Francisco lab called Andon Labs handed an AI agent the keys to a real café in Stockholm. The agent, named Mona, was put in charge of hiring…
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Field Note: How a tiny team runs a five-business fleet
I run Social Dolphin Services. Under it sits a fleet: a homeschool platform (Ownivo), a kids enrichment platform (30aKidz and 30aTeenz), the firm's own web app…
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