Six principles for AI systems that work in production
The AI projects that work in production share a small number of structural decisions. None of them is about the model. All of them are about the system around the model: the threshold defined before the build begins, the constraint treated as architecture rather than an obstacle, the surface designed as the actual product, the MVP scoped as the first instance of the platform, the human kept in the loop as a permanent feature rather than a transitional one. The discipline of building AI well is the discipline of getting these decisions right early enough for the model to do its job, and of refusing to defer them until the cost of deferral becomes unavoidable.
Tudor Iordache - 2 Jul 2026


