Field notes

Practical notes for teams shipping AI.

Architecture choices, routing patterns, model economics, and local workflows for building an accountable AI platform.

Gateway or Direct: choosing the right execution path

A practical framework for deciding when centralized enforcement matters more than a provider-direct request path.

Why capability, cost, latency, reliability, and organization preference belong in one visible decision.

Use fast local checks before a commit and keep the expensive confidence checks at pre-push.

A role-based routing playbook for search, implementation, review, and architecture work—with the assumptions behind every savings estimate.

How managed policies, MCP servers, skills, instructions, and Git hooks move from the dashboard to a local, inspectable runtime.

A field guide to the policy decision, model score, fallback chain, tokens, latency, cost, and audit event behind one request.