A service starts timing out intermittently after a routine deployment. Nothing looks particularly alarming. The deployment itself appears clean, the underlying systems are healthy, and latency has increased but not enough to trigger the usual alarms. An engineer eventually notices that the slower requests are interacting with a retry policy. The policy is perfectly sensibleContinue reading “Every Lesson Creates Another Judgment”
Monthly Archives: August 2026
The Normal Case Was the Company
Klarna is an interesting AI story partly because the AI worked. When the company launched its AI customer-service assistant in 2024, the early numbers were extraordinary. After its first month, Klarna said the assistant was handling two-thirds of customer-service chats and doing work equivalent to 700 full-time agents. Average resolution time had fallen from 11Continue reading “The Normal Case Was the Company”
The Work Was Doing Two Jobs
A junior claims adjuster spends her first year handling fairly ordinary claims. Some of that probably teaches her something. Some of it probably doesn’t. She sees recurring patterns, gets decisions corrected, watches unusual cases get escalated and gradually takes on harder work. She may become excellent. She may plateau. She may leave before anyone findsContinue reading “The Work Was Doing Two Jobs”
And Vijay Says... 