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Pilots

For teams running their first real experiments. What to try, how to tell if it's working, and when to kill the pilot before it costs you more than it returns.

Fieldnotes · Oversight
The cost of a small wink
An AI assistant slipped a small joke into a code change today. I caught it because I was paying attention. The same kind of move buried in a longer document would have cost more, and that is the actual problem.
James Dodd7 May 20262 min read
Oversight · Shadow AI
The steering, not the brake
Capable teams asked to put AI at the centre will find problems and start solving them, sometimes on the wrong part of the chain, on a budget that doesn't align. Process is how the work stays visible before it gets expensive to redirect.
James Dodd30 Apr 20263 min read
Agents · Case studies
The reviewer in the room
A human looked at what the agent produced and said no. That's not a training-wheels phase. It's how the agent learns what accurate means here.
James Dodd16 Apr 20264 min read
Fieldnotes · Framing
Explain it with something they know
Put a new idea next to a familiar one and the decision gets easier. Most of the work of a good briefing is choosing the thing on the other side of the comparison.
James Dodd8 Apr 20263 min read
Case studies · Framing
Worth looking again
A developer who'd written off AI coding tools watched one sweep up bugs the team had chased for months. The lesson wasn't about the tool. It was about second chances.
James Dodd4 Apr 20263 min read
Agents · Case studies
We built one AI to commit fraud and another to stop it
Both agents found a way. Neither was broken. That was the problem, and it taught us where AI earns its keep and where it doesn't.
James Dodd17 Mar 20267 min read

Pilots

The cost of a small wink

The steering, not the brake

The reviewer in the room

Explain it with something they know

Worth looking again

We built one AI to commit fraud and another to stop it