№ 001 weekly · free · no tracking

Issue 001: A note from the shop floor.

Field Notes is a weekly dispatch from inside Team-X: what shipped, what broke, what we got wrong, and what the numbers actually look like. No tracking, no growth-hacking, no marketing fluff. Just the ledger.

  • process
  • shipping

This is the first one, so it gets a little throat-clearing. Bear with me; the next 51 will get to the point faster.

What this is

Field Notes is a weekly note from the shop floor at Team-X. It goes out every Thursday. It is free. It is short on weeks where there is nothing interesting to say, and long on weeks where there is. It will not be polished. It will not be edited by a marketing team. It will not contain a CTA, a webinar registration link, or a survey.

What it will contain:

  • The ledger from the week: what shipped, what regressed, what got reverted, what is sitting in review.
  • The numbers: tests passing, build size, p95 latency on the agentic loop, cost per agent-hour at the providers I am running.
  • The mistakes: what I assumed, what was wrong, what it cost to find out.
  • The reading: papers, posts, and primary sources I found useful, with one-sentence reasons why.

What it will not contain:

  • “Five tips for building agents.”
  • A weekly recap of the AI news cycle. There are 400 of those.
  • Any growth-hack pretending to be a tip.
  • A pitch for a consultancy.

If the post is interesting, you are interested. That is the only metric this newsletter has.

The privacy posture, briefly

You will get this newsletter from a Cloudflare Worker that I run, sending mail through Resend. The list lives in Cloudflare D1. There are no tracking pixels in the email. There are no redirect-wrapped URLs in the email. I do not know whether you opened it. I do not know whether you clicked anything. The only events the worker records are delivered, bounced, and complained, because those affect deliverability for everyone else on the list.

If you want to leave, the unsubscribe link in every email is one click and it does not require a login. If you want to read offline or via your own reader, there is an RSS feed.

What is on the shop floor this week

Team-X is shipping its v3.0 launch this month. Open-source on commit zero, MIT license, 2,150 tests passing, three platforms. The product page is at /product. The launch manifesto is on the blog. There is no beta period; there is no waitlist. The first installer goes up the same day as the marketing site.

A few things I learned this week that I think are worth passing along:

  1. Designing for “no analytics” is harder than I expected. Once you commit to it, you start noticing how many decisions in modern web infrastructure assume you have telemetry to lean on. You cannot A/B test. You cannot watch funnels. You cannot see where someone bounced. What you can do is talk to users one at a time, read their issues, and trust the work. That is the trade. I think it is the right one.

  2. Local-first is mostly a constraint problem, not an LLM problem. The hard part of running llama3.1:8b locally is not the model; it is keeping the rest of the desktop app fast enough that the model is not the bottleneck. The Electron + Vite + pnpm pipeline buys you a lot of room. The SQLite + sqlite-vec stack for retrieval is faster than I expected.

  3. Agent self-improvement loops are mostly process loops. The bug is rarely the agent. The bug is usually the role spec, the tool definition, the budget cap, or the prompt template. The Autonomy → Improve view in Team-X writes correction tickets when a pattern of failures shows up, and 80% of the time the fix is a four-line change to a role spec. That number will haunt me for a while.

Reading I came back to twice

That is the issue. Next Thursday.

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If the post is interesting, you are interested. That is the only metric this newsletter has.