// library
How the work is actually done
In short
The library is where we write down how the work is actually done — the decisions behind an AI build, what breaks in production, and how to tell a good supplier from a confident one. Everything here is grouped by topic, and every page answers one question.
11 pages2 topics
Browse by topic
Retrieval and grounding: answering from your own contentEverything that happens at query time — how a passage is chosen, ranked, filtered by permission and cited — and how you tell 'the wrong documents came back' apart from 'the right documents, badly used'; the plumbing that gets content into the index lives in the data cluster, and eval methodology lives in the release-gate cluster.5 pagesDeciding what to build, and who builds itThe pre-engagement decision — whether to build, buy or configure, whether to hire in-house or bring in a partner, how studios, consultancies, agencies and freelancers actually differ, and how to justify the spend and run diligence on a vendor whose security posture rests on controls rather than certificates.6 pages
Recently published
- "Dedicated team" defined by what it does not promiseThe phrase commits a supplier to almost nothing on its own. What it usually means in practice, and the three artefacts that turn it into something you can verify.definition6 min
- Everything is now a change requestArguing about whether a change request is fair goes nowhere. Sorting the last 10 into 3 buckets says whether the bid was underscoped, the scope grew, or nobody decided.diagnostic9 min
- Finance sent it back again and did not say whyA second rejection with no stated reason is not obstruction. Ask which number would have to change for approval, and the reply identifies which of four defects you have.diagnostic9 min
- It worked on five hundred documents and broke at fifty thousandNothing regressed when the corpus grew. A candidate budget that comfortably held the answer at 500 documents now competes against a hundred times as many near-neighbours, and k never moved.diagnostic11 min
- The assistant quoted a policy that was replaced last quarterThe old version is still indexed, or it is gone and a cache is still serving it, or both versions are live and the old one ranks higher. One probe separates them.diagnostic10 min
- The citation points at the wrong paragraphA misaligned citation is a pipeline bug with a deterministic cause; an invented one is a grounding failure. One exact-string search against the original file separates them in under 5 minutes.diagnostic10 min
- The engineers who pitched are not the engineers writing the codeAn impression that the team changed is unarguable and useless. Commit authorship against the names in the proposal is measurable, and it separates a legitimate rotation from a silent downgrade.diagnostic9 min
- The right passages were retrieved and the answer is still wrongIf the answer-bearing passage was in the context and the answer is still wrong, retrieval tuning cannot help. Four synthesis defects produce this, and each leaves its own mark in the output.diagnostic11 min
- The supplier you want cannot pass a policy written for someone elseProcurement policies rarely require a certificate universally. They require one when a condition is met, and four of those conditions can be changed by how the engagement is designed.diagnostic10 min
- Total cost of ownership is a structure, not a numberA single total cost figure tells you nothing. The structure does: four phases, a fixed list of line items, filled in identically for every option you are comparing.definition6 min
- You know the document is indexed and it still never comes backFour layers can quietly drop one document, and they look identical from the outside. Probe them in cost order — existence, filter, exact text, rank — and each probe eliminates exactly one.diagnostic10 min
Have a build in mind?
Tell us where you are in a sentence or two. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right team, and what a sensible first slice of the work looks like.
Start the conversation