est. 2026  ·  weekly  ·  an ongoing series

Weekly essays on production AI systems, for technical leaders.

One concrete essay each week for CTOs, technical founders, and engineering leaders who need AI work to survive real users, real traffic, and real failure modes.

Fridays 09:00 UTC  ·  weekly, free, unsubscribe in one click
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§ 01 — this week's issue

This week's issue.

Updated weekly · fridays 09:00 UTC. One concrete production AI systems essay for technical leaders.
latest issue Runtime & Recovery / May 18, 2026

Middle Management Was the Runtime

Block's AI-org thesis is not just about replacing managers. It is about replacing implicit human state synchronization with an explicit company execution layer: a production-systems problem, not just an org-chart debate.

Read issue → 13 min read
§ 02 — pillars

Six pillars for production AI.

Six layers technical leaders need to inspect: context, state, action, recovery, human control, and evaluation.
01

Context & Retrieval

What information the system sees before the model acts.

  • · RAG architecture
  • · context assembly
  • · source selection
  • · context budgets
02

State & Memory

What the system remembers, persists, resumes, or exposes.

  • · conversation state
  • · workflow state
  • · execution ledgers
  • · resumability
03

Control & Orchestration

How model output becomes bounded, inspectable action.

  • · tool calls
  • · routing
  • · permissions
  • · approval gates
04

Runtime & Recovery

How workflows survive queues, retries, timeouts, and partial failure.

  • · queues & retries
  • · idempotency
  • · cancellation
  • · replay
05

Interfaces & Human Control

How people understand, steer, interrupt, and trust the system.

  • · streaming
  • · progress visibility
  • · review surfaces
  • · correction flows
06

Observability & Evaluation

How teams know what happened, whether it worked, and what to improve.

  • · traces
  • · evals
  • · regression sets
  • · failure mining
§ 03 — archive

Every issue, filterable by pillar.

1 issues so far · 13 minutes of total reading. Filter by the pillar you care about.
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