--- title: "Practitioner's Corner" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/54/practitioners-corner" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/54/practitioners-corner" issue: 54 section: "practitioners-corner" description: "Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale" authors: ["Sevda Polat"] published: 2026-11-09 updated: 2026-11-05 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 54 — Practitioner's Corner Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale ### Lead Essay - [Phantom Stock and the Checks That Never Fire]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-11-05 · Format: In Practice A grocery store's computer says the shelf holds six cans of tomatoes. The shelf is empty. Because the computer believes the cans are there, it never orders more, and the shelf stays empty while the records say all is well. ### Builder Profile - [Daniel Stenberg Named the Cost Before Asking for Help]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-11-05 · Format: Builder Profile The code in curl runs in billions of devices, so when someone reports a security flaw in it, its maintainer has to find out whether the flaw is real. AI tools have made such reports cheap to send, but each one is still slow to check. By May, more than one report a day was arriving, nearly all of them AI-assisted, about twice the 2025 rate. This profile follows a maintainer under that pile who is betting that strangers will step in to help. ### The Interview - [One Diagnosis and Three Hundred Permissions, an Interview from the Agent Help Queue]() — Published 2026-11-05 Most help desks are built on a comfortable fiction about the weather. Trouble arrives the way rain does in a mild climate, a shower here and a shower there, each indifferent to the others and dull in aggregate. You staff for the average, keep a cushion, and the queue behaves. ### Brief Counterpoint - [An AI Eye Exam Removed One Step, and Patients Got Lost at the Next]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-11-05 In a [Johns Hopkins trial](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10784572/) published in 2024, young people with diabetes needed an eye check, since diabetes can damage the eyes. Families handed a guide and told to book an exam elsewhere mostly didn't. Families whose child was photographed during the diabetes visit they had already come to, with AI reading the images on the spot, all completed it. ### Further Reading - **What an aborted tool call leaves unknown** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 A draft browser spec for agent tools, where cancelling a call leaves its outcome unseen. - **HTTP/2 on proving a request never ran** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 A short section on which signals prove a request was never processed, making resends safe. - **A header that names retried requests** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 Proposes an Idempotency-Key header so servers can recognize repeats, and admits not all will. - **Why a request ID isn't enough** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 Malcolm Featonby on why a request token must be saved with the resource it created. - **Why retries can prolong an outage** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 Marc Brooker on why a timeout says nothing about side effects, and how retries compound. - **What users deserve to see agents do** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 The W3C's architecture group argues agents acting on sites owe users a view of consequences. ### Past Articles - [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. - [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. - [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." ## Other sections in Issue 54 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()