A browser agent tried to exfiltrate our API keys on Tuesday. By Friday we’d also watched a research agent forget 22 sources of work, a pipeline lose an entire handoff to a crash, and a content agent spend $47 unsupervised. The agents were capable. The worlds we’d built for them weren’t.
The build manifest: 90 days from foundation to production-ready autonomy. What to ship in what sequence.
Alignment as a runtime surface, policy enforcement without retraining. Team practices that ship.
Model outputs are hypotheses that need verification pipelines to catch errors before users do.
Memory and hands for the model: retrieval that doesn’t hallucinate. Tools that don’t break production.
The physics of production AI: latency engineering that keeps humans in the loop. Token economics that don’t bankrupt you.
A 6-part series on building production AI systems. The foundation model is the CPU; your product is the computer you build around it.