Field Notes
Operational writing for AI in production.
Governance, supply-chain security, agent ops, observability. Written for the IT executive whose org is past the AI demo and into the audit review.
- 4 min readAI ActCompliance
The AI Act's high-risk obligations land August 2. Your agents qualify more often than you think.
On 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act's obligations for high-risk AI systems start applying. Most of the coverage is legal analysis aimed at model providers. If you deploy AI inside hiring, credit, or essential-service workflows — including agents you assembled in-house — the operational checklist is yours, and it's shorter than the legal memos suggest.
- 4 min readAI GovernanceLeadership
"Are we doing AI right?" deserves a better answer than a demo.
Every board is asking the question. Most CIOs answer with adoption numbers and a well-rehearsed demo — which answers "are we doing AI" and says nothing about "right." Here are five operational dimensions you can actually score, and what red, yellow, and green look like on each.
- 3 min readAgent OpsAI Governance
Your agents pass their evals and still break your processes.
Eval scores measure whether the model produced a good answer. Production incidents are almost never about bad answers — they're about skipped approvals, missing audit entries, and steps executed out of order. Task success and process conformance are different properties, and only one of them is on your dashboard.
- 4 min readMCPAI Supply Chain
The MCP server you approved is not the MCP server you're running.
Security review signed off on the MCP server in March. It's July, and the server has shipped four updates since — new tools, widened schemas, rewritten descriptions — none of which anyone re-reviewed. A point-in-time approval of a surface that mutates continuously is not a control. It's a memory.
- 5 min readIAMMCP
Every MCP connection is a service account no one provisioned.
MCP connections behave like long-lived service principals — broad scope, no owner, no expiry, no review. IAM teams spent a decade learning that lesson once. The agent stack is unlearning it in real time.
- 4 min readAI Supply ChainSecurity
The AI supply chain stopped being about model providers.
When your team connects an MCP server to Claude or ChatGPT, third-party tools, prompts, and resources land directly in a model's working memory. That's a software supply chain — and almost no one is inventorying it yet.
- 5 min readAI GovernanceAgent Ops
Your AI agents act in production. The audit trail does not.
Agents now ship code, file tickets, send email, move money. The systems they touch keep their usual logs — but the agent's reasoning, the tools it considered, and the version of the prompt it was running rarely make it anywhere durable. That gap is where the next class of incidents will be diagnosed, after the fact, with no data.