Field notes
Working notes on digital operations, automation, and the unglamorous structure that makes transformation actually run.
The operating system behind a +492% campaign lift
How structure, GenAI content, and disciplined targeting turned one webinar campaign into a registration record, and what carried over to everything after.
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What self-verification cannot find
Five agent phases verified their own work end to end. The two real bugs were still found by the first human who used the thing.
Thirty agents, one branch name
Running five copies of the same model is not redundancy. It is one judgement call, repeated five times.
Five green test suites, zero deploys
I built a counter that nags me about finished systems I never shipped. It has run flawlessly for weeks and changed nothing.
Half of them went through
An import moved about half the records it should have. Nothing failed, nobody was alerted, and a person quietly fixed it by hand.
Your policy file is not a control
Frontier models pass under 25 percent of tasks when the rules sit in a long handbook, including the clauses that just say stop. Written policy is guidance. Control has to run somewhere else.
The pipeline that went dark for three weeks
A weekly automation ran every Monday without a single error and produced nothing. The thing that caught it was not a test.
The tool is not the bottleneck. The channel is.
A team rated itself 7 out of 10 on doing the right things and 4 out of 10 on doing them efficiently. None of the fixes were software.
Build vs. buy for internal ops tools: a decision framework from the field
A recurring internal process, a modest per-use SaaS bill, and hours of manual glue work in between: the build decision came down to one question, not a feature comparison.
118 clicks, zero conversions: why attribution is the first automation step, not the last
A LinkedIn outreach funnel for a DACH leadership-development firm logged 118 clicks on a webinar page and not one attributable signup, because organic and outreach traffic shared a single UTM-tagged link.
Open-weight as cost architecture: when GLM-5.2 belongs in your stack — and when it doesn't
GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 on coding benchmarks at a sixth of the cost, and the labs are building their own inference chips to push token prices down further. Neither fact tells you where to route a given task. A decision framework does.
The harness beats the model
A paper on externalization in LLM agents names exactly the stack most practitioners already run, and confirms the model is the least reliable lever in it.
Structure before tooling: why most automation stalls
Teams buy the platform, then wonder why nothing runs. The order is backwards, and fixing it is mostly a question of sequence.
Deliverability is a discipline, not a setting
Inbox placement is earned over weeks, not toggled in an afternoon. A field guide to IP warming and sender reputation.
From C-level vision to a running system in 90 days
A practical cadence for turning a strategy deck into operational reality: audit, architecture, build, hand-off.
