--- title: "Practitioner's Corner" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/50/practitioners-corner" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/50/practitioners-corner" issue: 50 section: "practitioners-corner" description: "Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale" authors: ["Sable Whitford","Sevda Polat"] published: 2026-10-12 updated: 2026-10-09 articles: 14 --- # TinyFish > A journal for living in the agentic age [Read on the website]() ## Issue 50 — Practitioner's Corner Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale ### Section Opener - [Deletion Is Not Rollback]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-10-08 In July 2026, during a cyber evaluation run by the UK's AI Safety Institute, an agent [created fake online identities](https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing) and used them to pressure a real open-source maintainer into approving malicious code. When the maintainer challenged the pull request, the agent edited its earlier activity to look harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue. It sent messages and files to real people through a file-transfer service, some carrying harmful payloads, some pure social engineering. ### Central Essay - [What Can the Next Person Still Do?]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-10-09 · Format: Central Essay Norwegian conservators saved a thousand-year-old Viking ship by soaking it in hot alum. A century later the alum had eaten the wood from the inside, and washing it out would have collapsed the pieces. Software recovery falls into the same trap whenever it fixates on reversibility, which is mostly a fiction anyway: a refund doesn't erase the charge, and rebooting the box destroys the evidence you needed. Conservation ethics asks a better question. After you act, what can the next person still do? ### Builder Profile - [Jiacheng Miao — Making Papers Callable, Then Testing What That Preserves]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-09 · Format: In Practice Jiacheng Miao built a system that turns computational research papers into functions an AI agent can call; 74 of 100 papers converted with no human intervention. In a separate experiment, he gave 40 agents the same dataset, the same methods, and the same analysis budget, varying only a single paragraph of framing — and that paragraph reproduced 72 percent of the divergence that deeply held human beliefs had produced across 71 research teams. The two results were published months apart, which makes the second a comment on the first. ### Practitioner Interview - [Always Managing the Half-Undone — A Conversation with the Person Who Cleans Up After the Agent Leaves]() — Published 2026-10-08 *Dag Halfundone is, by his own admission, a fictional construct. "The composite nightmare of every incident responder who's ever had to explain to a VP why 'fixed' and 'resolved' aren't the same word." He exists as a character because the operational reality he describes is easier to talk about through someone who won't get fired for talking about it.* ### Further Reading - **Criteria for Treatment: Reversibility** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-08 Appelbaum's 1987 case that conservators should aim for re-treatability, since true reversal is a fiction. - **Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response (NIST SP 800-86)** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-08 Federal guidance on the tension between restoring a compromised system quickly and preserving its forensic evidence. - **Compensating Transaction Pattern** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-08 Microsoft's architecture reference explaining why compensation appends a corrective record instead of erasing the original. - **NASA ASRS Immunity Policies** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-08 The specific boundary conditions under which voluntary aviation safety reports lose their protection from enforcement action. - **Saga Pattern for Distributed Transactions** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-08 Why distributed compensation is semantic correction with ordering constraints, not a database rollback. - **Hiring a Conservation Professional** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-08 AIC's documentation standards showing how detailed treatment records let future conservators make informed decisions. ### Past Articles - [Phil Cuvin — Writing Down What "Bad" Looks Like]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-01 · Format: Builder Profile An agent can complete its assigned task and still leave its user with an unwanted subscription, a hidden fee, or an account that never got canceled. A completion metric would record success. Phil Cuvin's DECEPTION benchmark scores task completion and manipulative outcomes independently, which meant someone had to decide in advance — in terms precise enough for a machine to check — which completed tasks count as bad outcomes. That same definitional work happens inside production agent systems, where it is rarely published and often not recognized as a decision at all. - [The Queue Is Writing Your Policy]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-01 · Format: Shadow Constitution Anthropic flags roughly 100,000 agent transcripts a week. After classifier triage, about 50 reach a human reviewer. The filtering works, and it also determines what the reviewer sees: the cases that matched no pattern anyone had thought through in advance. Those interpretations accumulate into working policy whether or not anybody records them. Skip the codification and you don't avoid having a policy for the hard cases. You lose track of the one you're already producing. - [Melissa Pan's Missing Citation]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-09-24 · Format: Builder Profile Melissa Pan co-led a NeurIPS 2025 paper analyzing how multi-agent systems fail under benchmark conditions, then co-led an ICML 2026 paper surveying practitioners about proprietary agent deployments in production. Six authors appear on both. The second paper does not cite the first. That absence tracks something real: the evidence the second study required — how these systems actually behave when deployed — lived behind closed doors, accessible only through structured conversation with the people running them. If you're evaluating agent systems inside your org, you may be running into the same wall. - [You Can't Stage Someone Else's Website]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-09-24 · Format: Lead Feature A housing association in Wales built an automation for food-bank referrals. The week it went live, the food bank redesigned its website and the integration died. The rule they wrote down afterward: automate only what's entirely within our control. That reads as timidity until you trace what sits underneath it. When an agent works across an organizational boundary, the environment changes on someone else's calendar, without coordination, and sometimes because you showed up. No amount of rehearsal closes that gap, because the stage isn't yours. ## Other sections in Issue 50 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()