Field Notes
Thinking on operational systems, deployment realities, and what we've learned from real engagements. Not theory.
Published monthly — articles, field observations, and the occasional newsletter.
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12 notes
Company · 17 June 2026
A year ago Jayben and I started Slash Tech to fix one thing — good people being held back by technology that was never built for them. Here is what has held up, what has changed, and what the second year is about.
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Thinking · 13 June 2026
Agentic AI is being adopted faster than it's being trusted, and for good reason. An agent that takes actions in your operation isn't a faster tool — it's a new owner of decisions nobody can be paged for. The work of making it ownable is the same work it has always been.
Thinking · 8 June 2026
The case against your spreadsheets is usually the wrong case. The data structure problem existed before the first cell was filled in, and it will survive the replacement if you build to the same brief.
/// Slash Tech
May 2026
Company · 31 May 2026
Welcome to our First issue of our Monthly Field Notes. Follow along if you want to keep up to date with what we've published, shipped, and have in flight.
Company UpdatesCompany · 29 May 2026
We joined our partner Air Environment at The Gap State High School to speak with Grade 10 students about careers in engineering and science.
Thinking · 26 May 2026
Most consultancies will give you a quote for free. We won't. Here's why that's actually in your interest — and what a quote that comes before any real understanding is actually telling you.
Thinking · 19 May 2026
If you have been through an engagement that left you holding something nobody could maintain, your caution is not a problem to be managed. It is the most useful thing you can bring to a first conversation. What you do with it depends on whether the firm on the other side knows that.
Thinking · 12 May 2026
AI doesn't introduce new categories of operational decay — it accelerates the existing ones. Three failure modes show up in systems built by a model, and the work of making them owned is the same work it has always been.
Thinking · 27 Apr 2026
Five questions that tell you whether your operational system is experiencing decay — and what the answers mean for your team.
Thinking · 21 Apr 2026
You have seen the pitch — polished site, thirty-minute audit, deployment in weeks, an ROI that compounds. What it does not tell you is what you are inheriting. Three failure modes show up in this category of build, and they are structural, not accidental.
Thinking · 14 Apr 2026
There is a version of operational decay that does not look like decay at all. The documentation exists. The workflow is understood. The problem is that the system has never been asked to carry any of it.
Thinking · 17 Mar 2026
Most distributed systems aren't designed to fail. They're designed to launch. The cost of that distinction doesn't show up at deployment — it accumulates quietly, over months, in the teams left running something that was never built to be operated.
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The work we write about is the work we do. If any of it sounds relevant to what you're running, we should talk.
