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.
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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.
AI Can Compress the Work Without Owning the Judgment
The useful AI review packet shortens evidence gathering while making the reviewer’s corrections and acceptance easier to see.
4 min read
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Model Evaluation Is Mostly About Choosing Better Failure
My model notes became useful after I stopped looking for one winner and started recording which mistakes each workflow could survive.
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The Interface Between Humans and Automation Is an Authority Model
Automation becomes predictable when permission is part of the interface, not an assumption hidden behind it.
3 min read
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The First Job of an AI Agent Is to Preserve Context
An agent can stop, fail, or be replaced without losing the work if state lives in evidence-bearing artifacts.
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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.
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What I Learned From Rebuilding Twice
Rebuilding a system sounds like repeating the build. It rarely is. The first version accumulated decisions in the order I encountered them. A rebuild asks me to reproduce the result after that order, and much of the reasoning behind it, has disappeared.
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A Better Way to End a Work Session
A work session usually ends before the work does. The clock wins, attention gets thin, or the next obligation arrives. That’s normal. What causes trouble is leaving an unfinished system in a state that only makes sense to the person who has been staring at it for three hours.
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Why I Prefer One Clear Source of Truth
An agent can receive instructions from almost anywhere. A chat message describes the task. A scheduler supplies parameters. A repository contains conventions. A wrapper adds defaults. A saved prompt contributes another set of rules. Each source is convenient in isolation.
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The Most Useful Automation Is Easy to Ignore
One of the local automations I value most doesn’t have a dashboard. It watches a folder, waits for a file to finish arriving, applies a predictable transformation, and places the result where the next ordinary tool expects it.
3 min read
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The First Five Minutes of an Incident
The first five minutes of an incident are rarely long enough to diagnose it. They are long enough to damage the evidence, widen the uncertainty, and create three competing versions of what happened.
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