The USQRD Journal

Insights

Notes from the work, not the hype.

Practical thinking from the engineers and operators replacing manual work with systems that actually ship in production.

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Catching Agent Failure in Production Before Your Users Do
Lead storyField Notes

Catching Agent Failure in Production Before Your Users Do

How to detect AI agent failure in production before users notice — drift detection, online monitoring, confidence-based fallbacks, and the telemetry that makes it work.

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Featuring
Latest19 articles
How We Stress-Test an AI Agent Before It Ships
01Playbook

How We Stress-Test an AI Agent Before It Ships

The harness we use to break an agent before production does: adversarial inputs, failure injection, tail latency, cost per resolved task, and injection probes.

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How We Cut an Agent's Token Bill 60% Without Losing Eval Points
02Case Study

How We Cut an Agent's Token Bill 60% Without Losing Eval Points

An anonymised case study: where an agent's tokens actually went, the changes that cut spend ~60%, and the measurement discipline that proved quality held.

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Catching Agent Failure in Production Before Your Users Do
03Field Notes

Catching Agent Failure in Production Before Your Users Do

How to detect AI agent failure in production before users notice — drift detection, online monitoring, confidence-based fallbacks, and the telemetry that makes it work.

Read more
Workflow or Agent? A Decision Framework for Enterprise AI
04Framework

Workflow or Agent? A Decision Framework for Enterprise AI

Most enterprise tasks handed to us as 'agent' projects ship better as constrained workflows. Concrete criteria for deciding when to give a model agency — and when to take it away.

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Why Your Agent Makes 40 Tool Calls to Do a 6-Call Job
05Field Notes

Why Your Agent Makes 40 Tool Calls to Do a 6-Call Job

Production agents balloon their tool-call counts with redundant retrievals and second-guessing loops. How to instrument, budget, and detect thrashing.

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Why LLM Confidence Scores Lie — and Break Your Human Gate
06Field Notes

Why LLM Confidence Scores Lie — and Break Your Human Gate

LLM self-reported confidence and logprobs are badly calibrated. Here's how that breaks human-in-the-loop gating in production agents — and the cheap fixes that work.

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Golden Eval Datasets Rot: How to Keep Yours Honest
07Field Notes

Golden Eval Datasets Rot: How to Keep Yours Honest

Golden eval sets silently rot within months. How we source real edge cases, version evals alongside prompts, and refresh without invalidating history.

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The Agent That 10x'd Traffic and Blew Its Budget
08Case Study

The Agent That 10x'd Traffic and Blew Its Budget

An anonymised case study of an AI agent that worked in pilot but blew the budget at scale. Where the cost went, the fixes, and the before/after numbers.

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The Model Writes the Bug and the Confidence
09Field Notes

The Model Writes the Bug and the Confidence

AI-generated code ships exploitable flaws with total confidence. Why security review is the one step you can't delegate to the tool that caused the problem.

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Treat AI Agents Like Untrusted Insiders, Not Magic
10Field Notes

Treat AI Agents Like Untrusted Insiders, Not Magic

DeepMind's AI Control Roadmap signals the shift from hoping models stay aligned to securing agents like insider threats. Here's the executive mental model.

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The Eval Harness Is the Deliverable, Not the Agent
11Field Notes

The Eval Harness Is the Deliverable, Not the Agent

For agentic systems, the eval harness is what lets you ship with confidence and iterate safely. Here's what goes into a real one — and why teams pay for skipping it.

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Illustration for "Why Your RAG Demo Works and Production Doesn't"
12Field Notes

Why Your RAG Demo Works and Production Doesn't

The specific failure modes that kill RAG systems after the demo — retrieval drift, chunk boundaries, stale indexes — and how to catch them with evals first.

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Illustration for "Build vs Buy: AI Agents for Enterprise"
13Framework

Build vs Buy: AI Agents for Enterprise

A decision framework for CTOs and Heads of AI in 2026. Four paths — Build, Buy, Partner, Wait — with honest costs, timelines, and failure modes.

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Illustration for "Why Most Enterprise AI Pilots Die in Month 4"
14Field Notes

Why Most Enterprise AI Pilots Die in Month 4

The month-four death has remarkably consistent causes. None of them are technical. Four organisational failure modes that kill AI pilots.

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Illustration for "How Anglo American Cut Fleet Downtime 40% with Predictive Maintenance"
15Case Study

How Anglo American Cut Fleet Downtime 40% with Predictive Maintenance

Case study: 100+ vehicles, 2 years, 40% downtime reduction. What we built, why it worked, and the patterns worth stealing.

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Illustration for "The Anatomy of a 6-Week Enterprise AI Project"
16Playbook

The Anatomy of a 6-Week Enterprise AI Project

There is a specific shape that enterprise AI projects take when they actually ship. Here's the week-by-week breakdown.

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Illustration for "Buy vs Build vs Fractional: A Decision Framework for Enterprise AI"
17Framework

Buy vs Build vs Fractional: A Decision Framework for Enterprise AI

The question is almost never framed correctly. A framework for deciding how to stand up AI capability — honest about where each option breaks.

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Illustration for "AI Automation for Enterprise: What Actually Works in 2026"
18Playbook

AI Automation for Enterprise: What Actually Works in 2026

Most enterprise AI projects fail. Here's what separates the ones that ship from the ones that stall — based on what we've seen across 6 industries.

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Illustration for "Why More Companies Are Hiring a Fractional Head of AI"
19Leadership

Why More Companies Are Hiring a Fractional Head of AI

You need senior AI leadership but aren't ready for a full-time hire. Here's how the fractional model works and when it makes sense.

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