Five practices. Swap vendors when the brief demands it. Keep the order.
1. Write the verb
Who does what, and what is true after. Draft the reply. Retrieve the record. Route the exception. If that sentence dies in a skeptical room, you are shopping for a model. Keep it at the top of the ticket.
2. Golden cases from last week's failures
Twenty to fifty real traces, clustered in plain language, one fixture per failure mode. File them next to the feature. A playground transcript will not hold. A new judge cannot replace reading the pile.
3. Override on the same screen
Edit, reject, fall back. The person who owns the job should not open a second product to undo the first. High blast radius means this ships with the feature.
4. Trace the path
Structured logs at the boundary: allowed inputs, tools, output, human action. No secret-laden prompt dumps. When Tuesday breaks, you want a path, not a novel.
5. Privacy before the model call, then a boring ship path
If personal data leaves the device for a third-party model, the consent screen ships first. Then a deploy you have run more than once, and a rollback the operator can reach at 4pm. TestFlight, a flag, a store: pick the pipe. Do not confuse the pipe with the launch.
How to use this
Score the program. Fix the first missing piece that blocks someone from opening the thing. Usually the verb, the cases, or the consent. Rarely a new model name.
If you want a pod for that work, AI Development under Services is the offer. Start your build when you have a verb and a date.
Get our Articles and posts by email.
Up to one email a day with new Articles and posts from 22atlas.com and sean-weldon.com, plus occasional news about 22Atlas services.