All field notes

MLOps cost is dominated by people and process rather than by platform licensing. This guide covers what drives the number — deployment frequency, model count, monitoring depth, and team capability — why buying a platform rarely reduces headcount, and how to size the investment against what you actually run.

Prompt injection cannot be fully solved at the model layer, so defense is layered. This checklist covers content separation, detection, least-privilege tools, output validation, approval gates, monitoring, and adversarial testing.

A RAG system that demos well and fails in production usually skipped items on this list. Content curation, permissions, retrieval quality, grounding, evaluation, freshness, cost, and operations, each with evidence.

Smart contracts are hard to change and hold value, which makes pre-deployment security decisive. This checklist covers specification, access control, common vulnerability classes, upgradeability, oracles, testing, independent audit, and monitoring.

AI systems introduce controls SOC 2 auditors are now asking about. This checklist maps LLM applications and agents to the trust services criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, privacy, and change management.

A token launch is a legal, economic, technical, and operational event at once. This checklist covers legal structure, tokenomics, contract security, distribution and vesting, custody, liquidity, compliance, communications, and operations.

Most web application breaches exploit well-understood weaknesses. This checklist covers authentication, authorization, input handling, security headers, dependencies, secrets, logging, infrastructure, and testing before release.

Postings for the role surged and a16z called it the hottest job in tech. Why demand for forward deployed engineers exploded—and what it means for buyers.

Agent cost varies by an order of magnitude across use cases, and the driver is rarely the model. This guide covers what actually determines cost — integration surface, approval requirements, evaluation depth, and failure consequence — and how those differ across common agent use cases from support to finance.

Electrical contracting carries certification and test record obligations alongside ordinary field service pressures. This guide covers managing test certificates and periodic inspection records, dispatching by qualification, quoting from historical job data, materials planning, and why inspection and safety judgements remain with qualified electricians.

Moving companies quote from volume estimates that are frequently wrong and schedule crews and vehicles against jobs whose duration is uncertain. This guide covers estimating accuracy, crew and vehicle scheduling, storage utilisation, handling damage claims fairly, and communication on a day customers find stressful.

Plumbing mixes emergency callouts with planned work, which makes scheduling a constant compromise. This guide covers triaging emergencies by genuine urgency, dispatching with the right parts, quoting accurately from job history, balancing reactive and contract work, and why diagnosis and safety decisions stay with qualified plumbers.

Roofing is weather-dependent work quoted from surveys that are expensive to perform properly. This guide covers survey and measurement support including aerial imagery, quoting accuracy from job history, weather-aware scheduling, materials planning, and why access and safety decisions remain with qualified people on site.

Asia is the world's fastest-growing source of AI engineering talent. The leading hubs, the trade-offs, and how to secure production delivery with US oversight.

Labeling cost is driven by who has to do it and how consistently they can, not by the number of items. This guide covers what actually determines cost, why expert labeling changes the calculation entirely, how guideline quality dominates everything, and why the cheapest per-item rate frequently produces the most expensive dataset.

GPU training cost is dominated by things teams do not budget for: failed runs, data preparation, and hyperparameter search. This guide covers the actual drivers, why utilisation matters more than hourly rate, how parameter-efficient methods change the calculation, and why most enterprise use cases need no training at all.

Any AI system that touches protected health information is inside HIPAA. This checklist covers scope and business associate agreements, minimum necessary, access, encryption, audit logging, risk analysis, breach procedures, and vendors.

Intellectual property is protected offshore by contract and by architecture together. This checklist covers contracts under your law, buyer-owned assets, access controls, data handling, confidentiality practices, and audit.

LLM applications introduce attack surfaces conventional security reviews miss. This checklist covers prompt injection, data leakage, output validation, tool scoping, supply chain, logging, and testing, each with evidence.

MLOps maturity is the difference between models that ship once and models that ship safely every week. This checklist scores versioning, reproducibility, pipelines, evaluation gates, registry, deployment, monitoring, and governance by level.

A mobile launch is a store submission, a rollout, and an operating commitment at once. This checklist covers store readiness, device quality, performance, security, analytics, crash reporting, staged rollout, and support.

Next.js gives you the tools for fast pages and the freedom to misuse them. This checklist covers rendering strategy, caching semantics, images and fonts, bundle size, Core Web Vitals budgets, data fetching, and real-user monitoring.

The first thirty days decide whether an offshore team becomes part of your engineering organization or a vendor at arm's length. This checklist covers contracts, access, security, tooling, overlap, first deliverables, and knowledge capture.

OpenAI runs Forward Deployed Engineering; Anthropic runs Applied AI. How the frontier labs embed engineers with customers—and why the model is now mainstream.