✳ FIELD NOTES
Notes from the AI product frontier.
What we publish when we have something actually worth saying. Monthly at most.
FEATURED ESSAY · APRIL 2026 · 14 MIN READ Against the demo industrial complex. Most "AI products" are demos with a Stripe link. A real product has evals, runbooks,
and a plan for when the model is wrong — which is always. A working note on why that gap
is 6 months of unglamorous work, and why we charge for it up front. BY DANI ABEBE · FOUNDER, ENGINEERING — READ →
[ essay artwork ]
MAR '26 Eval-first, or why your RAG is probably broken And you don't know it yet. A field guide to finding out before your users do. 11 MINFEB '26 Why we don't use Figma handoff files anymore The prototype is the spec. What changed in our design process when the deploy link replaced the mockup. 8 MINJAN '26 Tokenizers for Ge'ez-script languages A practical note. What we learned shipping the Amharic tokenizer everyone now uses. 14 MINDEC '25 The "AI agency" playbook we stole from the 1960s Industrial design firms figured out embedded, accountable client work sixty years ago. 9 MINNOV '25 Guardrails are a product feature Users trust systems that show their work and admit their limits. Design for the failure case first. 7 MINOCT '25 What 400 small-business websites taught us about AI UX Lessons from Earendel Sites: where generation helps, where it embarrasses you. 12 MIN
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