--- title: "Practitioner's Corner" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/53/practitioners-corner" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/53/practitioners-corner" issue: 53 section: "practitioners-corner" description: "Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale" authors: ["Sevda Polat","Sable Whitford"] published: 2026-11-02 updated: 2026-10-30 articles: 14 --- # 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 53 — Practitioner's Corner Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale ### Builder Profile - [Faria Huq and the Reason Behind a Human Step]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: In Practice When a person takes control from an AI agent driving their web browser, the system records a human step, but not why. Faria Huq and her Carnegie Mellon collaborators have built tools around these moments: an agent that can't find the right forum, a shopper who realized the brand mattered only after seeing the agent's pick. Their system learns to predict when someone will step in. The reason it sets aside would tell a team whether to fix the agent, the website, or its understanding of the person. ### Feature Essay - [PHP's Memory Bug Had Fixes Long Before It Had a Decision]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: Feature Essay On October 21, PHP, the language running roughly seven in ten websites whose server language can be identified, shipped emergency fixes for every version it maintains. One flaw let an anonymous outsider run code on some servers by making PHP run out of memory at the wrong moment. ### Imagined Interview - [Program 14 Remembers Everything Except Why, In Conversation With a Liquidation Valuer]() — Published 2026-10-30 More small businesses now come to market with a new line on the asset list. It sits somewhere between the walk-in freezer and the delivery van, and it says *automations*. That might mean scripts that reconcile invoices, a spreadsheet that quotes jobs, or an agent that logs into a supplier portal at 6 a.m. and files the reorder before anyone has made coffee. Buyers want to know what it's worth. Brokers call it "the tech stack," in the voice people use for a loft conversion that may or may not have planning permission. ### Research Short - [Two Passing Patches, One Broken Merge]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-10-30 Two coding agents branch from the same Django commit. One renames a helper function, `phone2numeric`. Nobody tells the other, which writes new code calling the helper by its old name. Both patches pass their tests. Git merges them without a conflict, since they touched different lines. Then the merged code falls over with a NameError, because the old name no longer exists. ### Further Reading - **Cowboy's App Saved VanMoof Owners' Keys** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 A rival's quickly built app let VanMoof riders grab their bike keys before servers went dark. - **Humane's AI Pin Got Ten Days' Notice** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 HP paid $116 million for staff and patents, while owners' pins lost nearly every feature. - **Insteon Went Dark, Local Control Survived** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 Homes running through open-source Home Assistant instead of Insteon's own app kept their automations working. - **Insteon's Customers Simply Bought the Company** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 A handful of users bought what remained, an exit plan few other customers could copy. - **Pebble Returns, Open Source This Time** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 After years of volunteer upkeep, the revived Pebble publishes code designed to survive its maker. - **Who Owns Pebble's Rescued App Store?** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 The founder's return clashed with volunteers who'd kept thousands of developers' apps online for years. ### Past Articles - [Ananya Gubbi Mohanbabu and the Control You Can Get Back To]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-23 · Format: In Practice Ananya Gubbi Mohanbabu, a UC Berkeley PhD student, builds tools for blind and low-vision people who use screen readers, software that speaks the screen aloud. One of her systems hides page elements that seem irrelevant to the user's stated goal. In a 12-person study, its screen reader users finished tasks in about half the time they took without it. It can also hide the button someone needed. Her newest work tests AI agents that click and type for you, and asks what a person who cannot watch the screen needs in order to follow one, stop it, and take over. - [The Questions Completion Rates Never See]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-23 · Format: Feature Essay Boston gave residents seven categories for reporting city problems, plus "other." When a researcher read a sample of reports, nearly half sat in "other," and trash, among the most common complaints, had no box of its own. The city could see that gap only because people still reached for "other." - [How Phil Cuvin Made Agent Manipulation Measurable]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: In Practice A web agent that reads an interface well enough to book your flight can also read it well enough to be fooled by a fake "required" checkbox or a "most popular" badge. Phil Cuvin, along with co-authors Hao Zhu and Diyi Yang, built a benchmark called DECEPTION to measure how often this happens under controlled conditions. Agents fell for common manipulation tricks in over 70% of test tasks; humans averaged 31%. The vulnerability profiles were nearly inverted: agents are most susceptible at the points where they read the interface most carefully. - [Variance Is the Constraint]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: Feature Essay For decades, U.S. states reported average highway travel times. Two routes across New Jersey might average 58 and 59 minutes, functionally the same. But one swung nearly twice as much from day to day. The averages said the routes were interchangeable; the variance said they weren't. Federal rules eventually required states to report travel-time *reliability* alongside the mean. Web agents have the same measurement problem. A recent study ran the same agents on the same tasks three times: 46.5% succeeded at least once, but only 27.8% succeeded every time. ## Other sections in Issue 53 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()