I Do Run AI Agents Overnight. Here's What Actually Matters.
Boundaries, supervision, evidence, and why unattended execution is not the same thing as unbounded autonomy.
Petie Clark — Applied AI Systems
Applied AI systems that survive contact with the business.
Field notes on agent orchestration, evaluation, authority boundaries, enterprise integration, deployment, and production operations.
Get new posts in your inbox
No spam. No marketing. Just the writing.
/start-here
How I think about governed systems
Why I Prefer One Clear Source of Truth
Why tools can multiply while authority, state, and accountability still need one dependable home.
Why I Write Down the Rollback Before the Change
A deployment is not ready merely because the forward path looks convincing.
The Case for a Smaller Blast Radius
Production systems become trustworthy through bounded change, not theatrical confidence.
A Green Checkmark Is Not Proof
A passing check is useful once I can say what it checked, what it skipped, and what question still needs an answer.
4 min read
Read →
I Trust Automation More When It Knows Where to Stop
Useful automation needs a represented stop state, a retry budget, and a deliberate way back into motion.
4 min read
Read →
The Dashboard Is Not the System
A green runtime indicator answered a narrow question. The browser was asking the one that mattered.
3 min read
Read →
I Leave Capacity for the Weird Failure
Decision: routine workloads will not consume the space needed to preserve, copy, and compare a failed state. Capacity planning will include a diagnostic maneuver, not just normal demand and restart overhead.
4 min read
Read →
The Log I Will Actually Read
The log I imagine writing is comprehensive. It captures every branch, request, retry, timing detail, and internal state transition. Future me opens it, follows the trail with calm precision, and finds the answer hiding in line seven thousand.
4 min read
Read →
Every Service Adds a Future Chore
A service doesn’t add one generic maintenance task. It adds work at every dependency boundary where its assumptions can diverge from the next version underneath it.
4 min read
Read →
The Human Side of Self-Hosting
Self-hosting makes infrastructure unusually personal. A failed service may interrupt a movie, a file someone needs, a name lookup, or a quiet evening. The technical symptom can be small while the human consequence is immediate. It can also be technically noisy while nobody cares.
4 min read
Read →
What a Good Runbook Leaves Out
A runbook becomes less useful when it tries to contain everything its author knows. Background, architecture, troubleshooting, credentials, and every remembered exception accumulate around the actual procedure. The document feels comprehensive, but the operator has to excavate the next safe step ...
4 min read
Read →
The Case for a Smaller Blast Radius
“Blast radius” sounds like infrastructure language, but public-site work has one too. A content correction can touch a single essay, every page using a template, or the build and publishing path for an entire archive. The site may be static and the change may be mostly words. That doesn’t make th...
4 min read
Read →
Why I Keep the Old Path Until the New One Proves Itself
Replacing a scheduled path is deceptively simple. The old job runs on a clock, the new worker reacts to a richer trigger, and both appear to perform the same task. It’s tempting to disable the old entry, enable the new one, and call the migration complete when the first run succeeds.
4 min read
Read →