--- title: "Foundations" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/3/foundations" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/3/foundations" issue: 3 section: "foundations" description: "Conceptual clarity earned from building at scale" authors: ["Rina Takahashi"] published: 2025-11-13 updated: 2025-11-13 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 3 — Foundations Conceptual clarity earned from building at scale ### What Building Teaches Builders - [When Web Agents Need to Remember What They're Doing]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-13 · Format: Field Guide A web agent halfway through extracting hotel inventory across regional booking systems hits a rate limit. Should it remember where it was? Compare that to another agent checking a single price in three seconds. One workflow needs to preserve an hour of authentication and navigation state. The other can restart faster than you could save its progress. ### Web Evolution's Lessons - [The Twenty-Four Hour Problem]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-13 · Format: Web Archaeology During a site migration, our web agents encounter something strange: different parts of our infrastructure see different versions of reality. DNS resolvers return different IP addresses for the same domain. Requests time out. Authentication fails. A 1983 architectural choice, working exactly as designed. ### Pattern Recognition from the Field - [Everyone Built Agents Before Building Agent Governance]() — Published 2025-11-13 Six vendors launched AI agent identity management in November 2025. Microsoft, AWS, CyberArk, Ping Identity, Oasis Security, Akeyless. All solving the same problem: agent sprawl. ### Questions Worth Asking The questions you ask before choosing a tool matter more than the vendor answers you get. We've watched organizations stumble not because they picked the wrong technology, but because they asked the wrong questions. Or skipped the hard ones entirely. Teams focus on features and demos while missing what predicts success at scale. They evaluate tools in isolation instead of asking how those tools will interact with their actual processes, data, and people. These six questions cut through that noise. They're what we return to when evaluating anything meant for production, because they reveal what actually matters once the demo ends and real work begins. - **Can You Define Success Before You Launch?** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-13 Tag: Performance Baseline Service Level Objectives aren't paperwork. They're your shared definition of acceptable performance. Without them, every incident becomes a debate about whether things are actually broken. When monitoring and ownership exist before launch, mean time to recovery drops because responders know exactly where to look and who owns what. - **Will Compliance Costs Scale With Your System?** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-13 Tag: Compliance Scaling Most organizations focus on passing the first audit. The better question: how does your architecture affect ongoing compliance effort? Systems where evidence generates automatically and violations are prevented by design cost dramatically less to maintain than those where compliance is bolted on afterward. - **Does This Assume Your Processes Already Work?** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-13 Tag: Process Prerequisites Technology amplifies what you already do. If your processes are messy, software makes them messier faster. The tools that work best enhance existing clarity rather than attempting to impose structure where none exists. Look for solutions that fit how your business actually operates, not how vendors think it should. - **Will This Expose Your Data Problems?** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-13 Tag: Data Reality Planning tools need timely, structured, accurate data. They won't fix inconsistent formats or missing records. Poor master data produces unreliable outputs regardless of how sophisticated the software is. The question isn't whether the tool can handle your data—it's whether your data is ready for the tool. - **Would Your Team Actually Choose This?** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-13 Tag: Daily Usage Powerful software fails when users reject it. Clunky interfaces and inflexible reporting reduce adoption faster than missing features. The real test isn't whether the tool can do the job. It's whether your team will want to use it every day, under pressure, when easier alternatives exist. - **How Many Production Integrations Actually Exist?** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-13 Tag: Integration Proof Look for documented APIs, plug-and-play integrations, and published examples of successful deployments with tools your organization already uses. Custom stacks with no documented API and few integration examples signal future pain. Vendor promises about integration capabilities matter less than evidence of working implementations. ### In Dialogue With Complexity - [An Interview With 600 Mbps, the Bandwidth Threshold Where HTTP/3 Stops Working]() — Published 2025-11-13 We met 600 at a data center in Northern Virginia, where it spends most of its time being crossed. It's a peculiar existence—being the precise point where a technology's promise inverts into a problem. Below 600 megabits per second, HTTP/3 and its QUIC transport protocol generally perform as advertised. Above that line, something breaks. Throughput gaps emerge. Page load times stretch. The "future of the web" starts looking slower than what it replaced. ## Other sections in Issue 3 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()