Chris Knows Production AI

AI didn't make engineering principles less important. It made the ones we took for granted matter more. Production AI is the architecture, tradeoffs, and judgment that separate demos from systems that survive production. Written for engineers, and the leaders responsible for them.

Laws & Principles

What the Federal Reserve Teaches You About AI That Grades Itself

Aug 31, 2026

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8 min read

What the Federal Reserve Teaches You About AI That Grades Itself

Six men wrote a central bank on a private island in 1910. The clause that killed their plan is the one that decides whether your AI evaluation means anything.

Chris Morancie

Laws & Principles

You Didn't Become the Architect. The Handoff Got Cheap.

Aug 30, 2026

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6 min read

You Didn't Become the Architect. The Handoff Got Cheap.

One of the four things a role boundary sells got cheap. Teams are removing all four, and the bill arrives on three different timelines.

Chris Morancie

Laws & Principles

Aug 29, 2026

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8 min read

The Cost of Doing Something

The best move for a goalkeeper is standing still. Your AI programme has the same problem on three floors.

Laws & Principles

Manual QA Almost Disappeared. It Started Before Any Code Was Written.

Aug 25, 2026

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11 min read

Manual QA Almost Disappeared. It Started Before Any Code Was Written.

Three apps into production in three months. This is the prompt that runs before any of it, in full.

Chris Morancie

My Agents Outrun My Review. The Fix Wasn't Reviewing Faster.

Aug 14, 2026

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6 min read

My Agents Outrun My Review. The Fix Wasn't Reviewing Faster.

Five gates, running as machinery in two systems that share no technology.

Reliability

The Normal Systems Recovered. The Agents Did Not.

Aug 11, 2026

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9 min read

The Normal Systems Recovered. The Agents Did Not.

Last night 1.2 million queued files filled a disk and took down the data layer under an agent I'm building. We cleared it. Everything else came back. The agentic system came back different, and nothing on any dashboard said so.