Notes
Design to fail: what a retry cannot decide for youReliable workflows do more than retry. This framework helps you decide what is safe after a failed call—and when manual recovery is the smarter choice.“Just use a Google Sheet” is a risk decisionSheets are great for human review. The design gets risky when the same grid becomes the business’s only answer to “what happened?” and “what happens next?”A team skill library needs a librarian, not more promptsA practical pattern for one reviewed skill library: clear ownership, approved versions, and an MCP read path that reveals only the guidance a client needs.Automating 12% of customer inquiries for a print-on-demand companyA case study in turning scattered order data into a read-only service that helped lift support deflection by 12 percentage points without giving the model broad data access.What frontline operations taught me about AI architectureI learned architecture from the work behind the scenes: spreadsheets, hand-offs, missing context, and human judgement keeping everyday operations moving.