THE JOURNAL
Notes on building, shipping & securing the web.
FEATURED · AI
How we shipped a support agent that resolves 62% of tickets
The architecture, evals and guardrails behind a production AI agent — and the three mistakes we made first.
Daniel Reyes
Sep 18, 2026 · 5 min read
AI · 5 min
RAG for small teams: a knowledge base in two weeks
A pragmatic stack for turning your docs into an assistant your team actually trusts.
Daniel Reyes · Jul 28, 2026
AI · 5 min
Fine-tuning versus better prompting: a practical decision guide
When a fine-tuned model is worth the data work and maintenance, and when prompting, retrieval and a good eval set get you there faster.
Daniel Reyes · May 12, 2026
AI · 5 min
Building an AI sales assistant that reps keep using
Why most sales copilots are abandoned within a month, and the design choices that made one stick with a 40-person sales team.
Daniel Reyes · Feb 24, 2026
AI · 5 min
Voice agents on the phone line: latency, handoffs and honesty
What it takes to put an AI voice agent on a real phone line, from sub-second response times to clean transfers and clear disclosure.
Daniel Reyes · Dec 09, 2025
AI · 5 min
Giving AI agents tool access without handing over the keys
Scoped credentials, server-side policy, confirmation steps and prompt-injection defenses for agents that can take real actions in your systems.
Daniel Reyes · Oct 15, 2025
AI · 5 min
Keeping LLM costs predictable as usage grows
Budgets, caching, model routing and monitoring that stop a successful AI feature from turning into an unpleasant invoice.
Leo Tanaka · Aug 06, 2025
AI · 5 min
When workflow automation beats an AI agent, and when it does not
A decision framework for choosing between deterministic automation, a single LLM step and a full agent, with cost and reliability trade-offs.
Daniel Reyes · May 27, 2025
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