Writing
Notes on shipping AI systems that survive contact with users.
Shorter than a handbook, longer than a tweet. The hard-won opinions that survive a year of running production AI agents: RAG, evals, safe-handoff, the unglamorous craft.
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Cite or refuse: the rule that keeps RAG honest
We treat hallucination as a failure mode of design, not of the model. Every answer either cites or says no, and the eval set is what enforces it.
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We build the eval harness before the agent
Most agent demos work on a happy path and break on edge cases. We build the eval set first, so when something regresses you find out in CI, not in production.
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Safe-handoff: the line between automation and triage
An agent that 'tries to be helpful' on a question it can't answer is worse than no agent at all. Safe-handoff is a first-class action, not a fallback.