--- title: "Practitioner's Corner" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/22/practitioners-corner" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/22/practitioners-corner" issue: 22 section: "practitioners-corner" description: "Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale" authors: ["Nora Kaplan","Rina Takahashi"] published: 2026-03-30 updated: 2026-03-26 articles: 10 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 22 — Practitioner's Corner Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale ### The Invisible Overhead - [The Work the Spreadsheet Can't See]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-03-25 · Format: The Invisible Overhead A single agent step running at 95% reliability sounds fine. Chain twenty steps and you're below 36%. That gap has to be managed by someone: prompt maintenance, drift detection, failure triage across layers that didn't exist before deployment. None of it appears in the business case that funded the project. The accounting framework used to justify automation has no line item for work the automation itself generates. The costs are real, and they accumulate where no instrument exists to catch them. ### The Builder Profile - [Sumeet Vaidya and the Distance Between Writing Code and Shipping It]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-03-25 · Format: The Builder Profile An AI agent writes a code change in seconds. It compiles. It passes the sandbox. It touches a database schema, a caching layer, an auth service, and nobody finds out whether it actually works until the cost of finding out has already multiplied. Sumeet Vaidya spent a decade at Facebook, Uber, and Discord watching that distance between "looks right" and "works in production" grow wider with every new service dependency. With Crafting, he's placed a very specific bet on where the wall is, and it lives in the space between generated code and the production environment that has to accept it. ### The Practitioner's Day - [The Professional Noticer Keeping AI Agents From Quietly Losing Their Minds]() — Published 2026-03-25 *Pali Vega is not a real person, though her problems certainly are. She's a composite, assembled from practitioner forums, operational postmortems, and the specific weariness of people who've had to explain, more than once, why a dashboard full of green lights means almost nothing. Her title is Agent Operations Manager. Her actual job is keeping production agents working long after the team that built them has moved on to something shinier.* ### The Maintenance Curve - [The Agentic AI Cost Curve: Fast Builds, Slow Drowns]() — Published 2026-03-25 Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects face cancellation by end of 2027. Most will be narrated as technology failures. Look closer and the pattern is financial: teams that built fast discover they've inherited platform-scale obligations on a prototype-scale budget. ### Further Reading - **State of AI Agents (LangChain, 2025 Survey)** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-25 The gap between watching agents run and knowing they ran correctly, quantified across hundreds of teams. - **Why AI Agent Pilots Fail in Production (Composio)** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-25 A detailed anatomy of integration brittleness and the ongoing engineering tax it creates. - **AI Agents in 2026: From Hype to Enterprise Reality (Kore.ai)** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-25 Enterprise deployment stalls mapped to governance, permissions, and auditability requirements. - **Browser Agent Reliability: Benchmarks, Hype Gaps, and Real Task Performance (SoftwareSeni)** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-25 Independent testing puts a number on the distance between benchmark claims and actual task completion. - **Crafting Raises $5.5M to Build Testing Infrastructure for AI-Driven Engineering** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-25 Validation infrastructure as its own emerging category of necessary, invisible meta-work. - **Indirect Prompt Injection Observed in the Wild (Palo Alto Networks Unit 42)** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-25 First documented in-the-wild prompt injection attack on a production AI agent system. ## Other sections in Issue 22 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()