Journal
Notes from production engagements, anonymized.
Written by Conformal Engineering and the partners doing the work. We publish when an engagement teaches something reusable: architecture patterns, evals, field notes, hiring practices, and strategy that survives contact with production.
Engineering
7 min · 12 Apr 2026
Why most enterprise AI roadmaps die at slide 19
The 47-slide deck specifies an "Enterprise CEO Chatbot" on slide 19. Then nothing happens for two years. Here's what we've learned about the gap between strategy and shipping, and the small structural changes that close it.
Architecture
11 min · 28 Mar 2026
The agent writes the SQL. The system around it does the hard work.
Composable schema documentation, deterministic retries, the right way to stream tool-use traces. A field guide to the supporting cast around every production agent, and why getting it right matters more than which model you choose.
Strategy
9 min · 15 Mar 2026
"AI strategy" is an oxymoron. Pick a decision instead.
The thirty most successful enterprise AI rollouts of the last eighteen months have one thing in common: they replaced a specific human decision, not a generic workflow. How to find the decision worth attacking, and the four signs you've picked the wrong one.
Evaluations
14 min · 2 Mar 2026
Building evals you'd actually show a board
"Accuracy" is the wrong metric for an executive agent. We walk through the evaluation harness we use for production CFO and procurement agents, the gold-set methodology behind it, and the kinds of failure modes generic benchmarks completely miss.
Field notes
6 min · 19 Feb 2026
What 60 hours of CFO interviews taught us about variance bridges
Before building a finance agent, we spent two months in the seats of the people who'd use it. The themes that emerged, and the ways they shaped the eventual product, are the most repeatable part of our process.
Engineering
8 min · 5 Feb 2026
DuckDB-WASM in the browser is an underrated production pattern
Why we run analytics in the user's tab instead of on a backend, when this pattern fails, and the specific class of executive-agent UI it unlocks.
Hiring
5 min · 22 Jan 2026
We do live engineering interviews. Here's the prompt.
No take-homes, no whiteboard puzzles. The 90-minute exercise we run with every engineering candidate, and what we're actually looking for inside it.
Strategy
10 min · 8 Jan 2026
The CEO chatbot is a category, not a feature
Every large enterprise will have one in three years. The question isn't whether. It is who owns it inside the company, and what shape it takes. A framework.
You've reached the end.