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The TWIMCO notebook

Field notes.

Useful observations from inside the work.
For people building a better way.

385 notes

Editorial engraving of a bright records room with rolling shelves, where an IT lead with a tablet looks into the one aisle left open at an archive box with its lid ajar, while three colleagues behind her type at laptops along a counter.
AI in practiceField note

Your AI assistant will find the folder everyone forgot was shared.

For years, an old salary spreadsheet shared with the whole company was safe in practice, because nobody could find it. An assistant that searches everything a person can open finds it in seconds. Spend an afternoon asking the questions an over-curious colleague would.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit photo studio where a family with a toddler and a fashion crew with a clothing rail arrive at the open door at the same time, while the studio owner between them looks from a tablet to a paper diary.
CommerceField note

Two customers booked the same Saturday. Here's what actually broke.

Saturday, 9:55 a.m. A family with a toddler and a photographer is at the studio door, and so is a fashion crew with a rail of clothes. Both have confirmations. Walking back through how it happened shows that nobody did anything wrong, which is exactly the problem.

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Editorial engraving of a skylit loft where a business owner in her sixties holds a printed contract and pen beside a young developer pointing at a large monitor of abstract code bars with one faintly outlined block, while a colleague walks past in the background.
Buying softwareField note

Ask how AI touched your code, then write the answer into the contract.

Almost every developer you might hire now works with AI tools, and almost no proposal says so. Here are the questions to ask on your next call, what a reassuring answer sounds like, and what belongs in writing afterwards.

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In a sunlit clinic consultation room, a nurse practitioner in a sage cardigan holds a terracotta pen over a printed page she is marking up, an open laptop beside her and an unsealed envelope waiting on the desk, while an older man and his adult granddaughter sit across from her and listen.
AI & judgmentField note

Anthropic's human-review rule isn't new. Now it's spelled out.

If your Claude-powered screener tells someone they don't qualify, a qualified person was always supposed to see that first. Anthropic's October 8 rewrite makes the rule much harder to miss.

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Editorial engraving of a bright office above a lumber yard, where a row of identical envelopes moves along a small mail rack while one is set aside, a bookkeeper smiles during a phone call at his laptop, and a colleague in a work vest points to the set-aside envelope.
OperationsField note

Automate the invoice reminder. Keep the phone call.

Nobody enjoys chasing a client for money, so it slides until the end of the month. Reminders are a great job for software, as long as the software knows when to stop: the invoice is disputed, the customer already promised a date, or the payment arrived this morning.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit greenhouse where a designer sorts blank cards into four seed trays and a compost bin at a potting bench, while an older nursery worker on a step ladder glances at a single soft glow on the phone clipped to his apron.
Product & engineeringField note

Sort your app's notifications before your users do it for you.

Somebody on your team added each notification for a good reason. Together they've taught your users to swipe without reading, or to switch them off. Sorting them into four piles takes an afternoon and usually ends with fewer, better interruptions.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit bakery back room where the owner in a flour-dusted apron reorders on a tablet beside stacked crates and a clipboard of last month's order, while a delivery driver wheels in crates through an open roll-up door.
CommerceField note

Your wholesale customers want to reorder, not browse.

Most wholesale buyers already know what they want. It's roughly what they ordered last month, sent over from a PDF price list by email. Build the portal for that before anything else.

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Editorial engraving of a bright civic library where a stack of paper forms sits on a counter at left, while at right a man in a wheelchair wearing headphones completes a short online form on a laptop with a staff member beside him.
Product & engineeringField note

Putting the PDF online isn't putting the service online.

A fillable PDF on the county website feels like progress. For the person applying, it's still a paper form, just harder to fill in on a phone. Here's what changes when the form becomes a service.

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Editorial engraving of an old building renovated room by room, with scaffolding and a carpenter on one side, a finished room in use by a working team on the other, and an owner and architect walking through the arch between them.
Buying softwareField note

A letter to the owner of the system everyone wants to rewrite.

You've heard it in three meetings now: the old system has to go, so let's rebuild it properly. Before you sign off on that, here's what we'd want you to know, as plainly as we can put it.

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Editorial engraving of a skylit warehouse seen from a mezzanine, where an operations lead with a tablet and notebook looks down at one order split into two boxes joined by a red string that runs to two pins on a wall map.
OperationsField note

Before the second warehouse opens, decide which orders it gets.

A second warehouse sounds like faster shipping. In the first week it mostly produces questions: who gets this order, what happens when half of it is in each building, and which stock count the store should believe.

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Editorial engraving of a bright office kitchen where four colleagues of different ages stand at a counter sorting blank cards into green, ochre and terracotta folders and a small locked tin, with a phone and laptop among them.
AI & judgmentField note

Your team already uses AI. Write the policy for that team.

If the policy says no AI and people are pasting customer emails into a chatbot on their phones, the policy isn't working. These are the questions worth answering before you write one more rule.

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Editorial engraving of a bright support office where a physical control panel has been taken apart and laid out on a pegboard, with a man in a headset pointing at a search dial and a young engineer sorting the parts with a laptop on her knee.
Product & engineeringField note

The admin screen is where your software earns its keep.

Customers see the polished part. Your team spends the whole day in the back office, which is usually where a product quietly falls apart. So let's take a typical admin screen apart, one piece at a time.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny city corner where a courier on a cargo bike checks a phone in a handlebar mount while, at a café table nearby, an older woman taps her phone once beside a coffee and a folded newspaper.
Buying softwareField note

You may not need an app. Here's how to tell.

"We need an app" is sometimes exactly right and sometimes a way of saying we want to be taken seriously. Four common beliefs are worth checking before you pay to build and maintain two of them.

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Editorial engraving of a bright office corridor beside an empty glass office with a sun hat and beach postcard, where a young man holding a request folder checks his watch as a colleague with a tablet walks up to help.
OperationsField note

Your approval chain will stall on someone's vacation. Plan for it now.

Picture the last week of the quarter. A purchase is stuck, the approver is somewhere sunny, and three people keep refreshing their inboxes. Almost all of it can be fixed before it ever happens.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit finance office where an older woman at a standing desk holds a paper invoice and compares it with a monitor that outlines one region of a scanned page beside a column of extracted fields.
AI in practiceField note

The AI reads the invoice fine. Plan for the one it doesn't.

It's Monday, a few hundred invoices are waiting, and the demo read every sample perfectly. The part worth designing is the page it reads slightly wrong, the one that looks complete and nobody questions.

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Editorial engraving of a skylit furniture showroom where a merchandiser pins blank index cards into four columns on a rolling corkboard while a young colleague holds a laptop showing an empty results box, with sofas and a swatch book around them.
CommerceField note

Before you buy AI search, read what people couldn't find.

Somewhere in your analytics is a list of things people typed into your search box and got nothing back. It's the most honest research you own, and it often explains more than a new search engine would.

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In a bright tile showroom, a young man in a denim jacket checks his phone beside a hand-drawn floor plan while a staff member across the counter pulls a real tile sample from a stack next to an open order ledger and laptop, and a colleague checks pallets in the warehouse behind her.
Product & engineeringField note

ChatGPT builds the calculator now. Build the one it can't.

Ask ChatGPT for a bill splitter today and it draws one in the chat. So which tools on your site still earn the visit? The ones that need something only you know.

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Editorial illustration for Field Note: Freeze config the night before you cut over.
OperationsField note

Freeze config the night before you cut over.

On the evening before cutover, someone flips a flag "just for the test" and a cron job deploys an old config. By morning, what you cut over isn't what you reviewed. A freeze needs a list you can check, not a channel message asking people to be careful.

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Editorial illustration for Field Note: Name auth, capture, and settle before checkout ships.
CommerceField note

Name auth, capture, and settle before checkout ships.

Order placed, says the screen. Somewhere else the card hold may or may not exist and the stock may or may not be reserved. When those feel like one moment and are really several, you end up shipping what you never captured.

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Editorial illustration for Field Note: Spec the conflict before the field app ships.
Product & engineeringField note

Spec the conflict before the field app ships.

A technician saves a status with no signal. Someone else edits the same record on another device. Both are honest, and when they reconnect one will win, the fields will mix, or the record will freeze. If you don't choose, the software will.

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A good place to begin.

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