Notes

Field Notes.

Observations, product thinking, and lessons from building applied intelligence systems.

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Agents Don't Need a Company Brain. They Need a Company They Can Work In. Agents do not fail inside companies because they lack a bigger wiki. They fail because company facts do not change company work. RAG Is Not the Decision Layer Your Agent Needs RAG can retrieve evidence. It cannot decide what the company currently believes, which source wins, or which action is allowed. MCP Gives Agents Handles. It Does Not Give Them Judgment. A valid MCP tool call can still be a bad business action. That is the distinction most agent demos skip. Context Rot Is Why Your Agent Needs a Map More context can make an agent worse. That is the part most companies still do not want to hear. What is an ontology? A company ontology is a model of what exists in a company, how those things relate, and what agents can safely do with that map. Why agents do not onboard like people People become useful by seeing work, acting, being corrected, and updating their company map. Agents need that loop made durable. Access is not a map Tool access lets an agent see and act. It does not tell the agent how the company fits together.