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© 2026

Field Notes

Field Notes are fast, from-the-trenches observations. Time-bound and may age poorly. Summarized from my real notes by . Optimized for utility. Not investment or legal advice.

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=======================
Field Note Clanker
=======================
⏺ Agent start
│
├── 1 data sources
└── Total 1.8k words
⏺ Spawning 1 Sub-Agents
│
├── GPT-5: Summarize → Web Search Hydrate
├── GPT-5-mini: Score (Originality, Relevance)
└── Return Good Notes
⏺ Field Note Agent
│
├── Sorted to 2 of 7 sections
├── Extracting 5 key signals
└── Posting Approval
⏺ Publishing
┌────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Warning: Field notes are recursively │
│ summarized by agents. These likely age │
│ poorly. Exercise caution when reading. │
└────────────────────────────────────────┘

Field Notes - Jan 16, '26

Executive Signals

  • Gateways are the new apps: ship one endpoint, avoid platform sprawl, reuse proven configs
  • Ingest before infer: durable capture beats brittle early intelligence in production
  • Big room, small truth : fewer observers surface real workflows
  • Freeze beats heroics: skip Friday pushes and holiday-adjacent windows to protect on-call capacity
  • Evidence over calendars: promotions follow SLOs and rehearsed rollbacks, not dates

Product

Ship Ingestion Before Intelligence

Decouple capture from interpretation. First, make inbound email and attachments land reliably with idempotency and observability; then add parsers. This lowers integration risk while producing immediate, testable value and a stable interface for downstream work.

  • Persist raw payloads and attachments; enforce idempotency via Message-ID and queue for downstream
  • Build a replay harness with fixture emails to run dev → stage → prod
  • Gate promotion on ingestion SLOs; ship parsing rules the following sprint

Small Rooms, Better Automation Discovery

When automating human workflows, a smaller, builder-led session with the SME reduces threat responses and yields clearer signals. Recording the live workflow makes implicit decisions explicit and convertible into rules and tests. Keep the posture “assist first”; role changes are a leadership call, not a workshop outcome.

  • Limit to 2–3 builders plus one SME; record screen and narration
  • Extract decision points; translate into parser rules and executable tests
  • Publish the artifact as an assistive flow; defer org changes to leadership

Engineering

Expose One Endpoint, Not a New App

Instead of creating a new external service to ingest email webhooks, expose a single POST endpoint from the existing internal app via an API gateway. One codebase across environments reduces platform sprawl, speeds production readiness, and concentrates security controls at the edge.

  • Route only /inbound-email through the gateway; block all other paths
  • Enforce HMAC, provider IP allowlists, TLS termination, and rate limits at the edge
  • Reuse proven gateway templates from sibling teams before adding new infra

Treat Fridays and Holiday Mondays as a Change Freeze

Gateway approvals arrived on a Friday, but production waited until after the holiday window. That restraint avoids thin on-call coverage and brittle Friday deploys. Favor predictable, staffed windows with rehearsed rollbacks over calendar-driven pushes.

  • Target Tue–Thu deploys with a 4–6 hour daylight window and a tested rollback
  • Require written sign-offs for external boundary changes (gateways, webhooks)
  • Advance on test evidence and SLOs, not calendar pressure
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