What we learned, written down
Technical papers, field notes, and release notes from the engineering, manufacturing, and software teams. Every piece is tagged with the domain it came from.
All insights
12 pieces
Giving an agent access to real systems
What changes between an assistant that answers questions and one that acts on your systems — and what has to be in place before it is allowed to.
A standard connector between AI and your systems
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI applications to data and tools. It turns an integration matrix into a set of interfaces.
Grounding a model in documents you control
Retrieval-augmented generation is how a general model answers questions about your plant — without retraining it, and with a citation you can check.
Prompting is specification, not conversation
The prompt is the interface contract between your application and the model. Treated as chat, it drifts. Treated as a specification, it can be reviewed and tested.
What a language model is actually doing
A useful mental model of how these systems work, and what that mechanism implies about where you can safely put one.
Narrow AI is what reaches production
General intelligence is a research goal. The systems that survive a factory acceptance test are narrow, bounded, and dull by comparison.
Designing for test before you design the board
Test coverage is a layout decision. Deciding it late is what turns a two-spin project into a five-spin one.
What a pilot build should actually prove
A pilot run is not a small production run. It exists to prove the process, the fixtures, and the documentation.
Choosing a wireless stack you can still support in year five
Range and power get the attention. Certification, module lifecycle, and field diagnostics decide the cost.
Condition monitoring that survives the first quiet month
Anomaly models drift. The operating discipline around them is what keeps the alerts worth reading.
Bringing SAP data into an operations dashboard
A pragmatic integration pattern for plants that cannot pause the ERP to modernise reporting.
Traceability is a design requirement
Serialisation, marking, and record-keeping decided at design time cost almost nothing. Retrofitted, they cost a line.
A short note when something is worth reading
No newsletter cadence for its own sake. We send a note when a paper or a field write-up goes up — roughly monthly.
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