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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/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.
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.
4 min read
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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
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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
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The Restart Was Not the Recovery
A restart is satisfying because it produces motion. The process stops, the process starts, and the terminal returns a clean status. That can be exactly the right repair. It can also leave the system holding the same bad state, an unprocessed queue, and several users who are still refreshing a bro...
4 min read
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The AI Productivity Paradox Is Real - But You Are Measuring the Wrong Thing
CEOs say AI isn't moving the needle on productivity. I've been running AI in production for months. Here's why they're both right and wrong — and what the actual measurement problem is.
5 min read
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