--- title: "Practitioner's Corner" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/23/practitioners-corner" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/23/practitioners-corner" issue: 23 section: "practitioners-corner" description: "Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale" authors: ["Rina Takahashi"] published: 2026-04-06 updated: 2026-04-02 articles: 9 --- # 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 23 — Practitioner's Corner Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale ### The Attribution Gap - [The Agent's Alibi]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-04-01 · Format: The Attribution Gap Seventy-eight percent of enterprises are piloting AI agents. Fourteen percent have made it to production. That gap has held steady through billions in improvement spending on data pipelines, prompts, tooling, and models. Every fix is genuine. The gap barely moves. ### The Forensics Problem - [One Production Failure, Thirty Scenarios, and the Debugging Infrastructure That Didn't Exist]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-04-01 · Format: The Forensics Problem A customer support agent submits a credit card replacement before the customer agrees to it. The session log looks clean. Every tool call completed, every response was generated on time, and the conversation reached a natural close. Standard monitoring sees a successful run. The agent made a bad judgment call inside a reasonable-looking transcript, and nothing in the observability stack can tell you where. ### The Post-Mortem Pattern - [The Agent Incident Investigator Who Keeps a Second Set of Notes]() — Published 2026-04-01 *Practitioner's Corner sometimes talks to people who don't technically exist, but whose problems very much do. Declan Farrow is a composite: an "Agent Incident Investigator" assembled from the patterns, frustrations, and dark humor of practitioners who spend their days running post-mortems on production AI agent failures. His background in insurance claims adjustment is fictional. His observations are grounded in documented incidents and published research. His private log is imaginary. The things in it are not.* ### The Systems Thinking Trap - [Agent Failure Attribution Is Entering Aviation's Systems Thinking Trap From the Opposite Direction]() — Published 2026-04-01 Aviation spent fifty years writing "pilot error" on accident reports before recognizing the phrase explained nothing fixable. The corrective was systems thinking. Failures became organizational, distributed, contextual. Better, and also convenient: when every failure belongs to the system, no specific component bears obligation to change. ### Further Reading - **AI Didn't Break Your Production — Your Architecture Did** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-01 Where you point the blame shapes what you fix. The attribution problem, stated plainly. - **The Multi-Agent Reality Check: 7 Failure Modes When Pilots Hit Production** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-01 A useful anatomy of how multi-agent coordination degrades. The taxonomy reveals how many failure surfaces hide behind one symptom. - **AI Agents: Why the Gap Between Demo and Deployment Keeps Widening** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-01 A counterintuitive argument: better tooling makes demos shinier, which makes the production gap harder to see. - **AI Agent Scaling Gap March 2026: Pilot to Production** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-01 Survey of 650 enterprise leaders puts a number on the gap: 78% piloting, 14% in production. The drop-off is structural. - **How Veris AI and Lume Security Built a Self-Improving AI Agent with Microsoft Foundry** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-01 A concrete case of turning production failures into reusable scenario families. The feedback loop, built deliberately. ## Other sections in Issue 23 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()