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.
From Months to Days: How Agentic LIMS Delivery Compresses the Work
How validation maps, parallel delivery lanes, native-workflow fit, production-like clone proof, and explicit human authority compressed LIMS delivery from months to days.
4 min read
Read →
The Most Expensive Queue Is the One Nobody Owns
A queue becomes dangerous when an item can remain visible without anyone owing its next decision.
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 →
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 Maintenance Window Is Part of the Design
A maintenance window isn’t merely a polite time to make a change. It is a finite engineering resource. The design has to fit inside it with room for observation, correction, and retreat. When the change plan consumes the whole window on paper, the failure has already started; the clock just hasn’...
4 min read
Read →
A Quiet System Is Not Always Healthy
Low-traffic systems age in place. They can sit for weeks looking perfectly composed while credentials expire, permissions drift, indexes lose contact with their sources, and background workers retain assumptions nobody has exercised since the last upgrade.
4 min read
Read →
Why I Write Down the Rollback Before the Change
The rollback used to be the last part of my change notes. I’d describe what I wanted to alter, list the commands, think through validation, and then add a reassuring line about putting things back if necessary.
3 min read
Read →
Small Systems Make Ownership Obvious
Small systems have nowhere to hide their assumptions. That can feel limiting when I’m building one, but it’s a gift when I have to operate it later.
3 min read
Read →
What Chores Teach Me About Queues
Household chores are a brutally honest queueing system. Work arrives from ordinary life, the machines have fixed capacity, and completed-looking steps have a habit of producing another pile somewhere else.
3 min read
Read →