The TWIMCO notebook

Field notes.

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

385 notes

Ask for the app rating right after something went right

Most apps ask for a rating at the worst moment: on launch, halfway through a task, or right after something failed. Apple and Google both limit how often the prompt can appear, so each ask is worth saving for a good moment.

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Editorial engraving of a bright townhouse support room where two colleagues compare a coat's tag on a phone while one writes a short policy on paper.

CommerceField note

The price dropped the week after they bought

Someone paid full price on Tuesday. On Friday your sale starts, and their phone tells them so. Whether you refund the difference is a policy you should write now, not one a support agent or a chatbot invents in December.

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Editorial engraving of a shopper on a sunny park bench browsing a phone cart while, across the street, a clerk packs an order in a bright shop window.

ReviewsReview

Google Universal Cart review: the cart is Google's, the order is still yours

Shoppers can now keep your product in a Google cart next to three other stores, get pinged when your price drops, and hand the whole thing to your site in one click. Most of what decides how that goes lives in your product feed.

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Editorial engraving of a skylit packing bench where a packer relabels a sealed carton while a support lead holds up a phone message beside her.

OperationsField note

The address changed after the label printed

A customer writes at 2:10 to say the apartment number is wrong. The label printed at 1:55 and the truck leaves at 4. What happens in the next two hours decides whether you pay for one shipment or two.

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In a bright civic service office with tall arched windows, an older woman in a sage blouse points to a paragraph in an open binder of regulations while a younger colleague holding a tablet leans in to check it; a stack of forms and a rubber stamp sit on the table, a cart of file boxes stands behind them, and at the counter in the back a staff member helps a woman holding a toddler.

ReviewsReview

Gemini for government services review: strong on sources, still a preview

Google pitched agencies an AI that reads the regulation, checks the paystub and drafts the ticket, with a link back to the page it used. It's a preview with no price yet. Here's who should take a slot, and what to ask first.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit library workspace where an admin and an operations lead sort tokens into two jars beside a laptop and a row of blank index cards.

ReviewsReview

Notion AI credits review: decide who pays for each agent before November 2

Notion just changed how its AI is paid for. Everyday work on Auto gets a monthly allowance per person, and a Custom Agent you share spends your credits unless an admin moves it to a workspace budget. Existing workspaces switch on November 2.

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Editorial engraving of a bright skylit studio where a woman sketches a diagram of linked boxes on a whiteboard, the center one hatched over with arrows looping around it, while a colleague talks on the phone and another takes notes; an open laptop, an unplugged power strip and a stack of parcel envelopes sit on the desk in front.

OperationsField note

One cloud zone went dark in London. Would your app have stayed up?

Early on Tuesday, one of Google's three London cloud zones lost power, and its advice was to move your own workload somewhere else. Here's how to tell whether that would have been your app, and what to check this week.

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In a bright records office with tall windows, pale green filing cabinets and potted plants, three colleagues stand at a long wooden table comparing old and new output: a silver-haired woman holds up an old green-striped printout, a young man in a green hoodie lines up a fresh printout with a steel ruler, and a man in a light-blue shirt ticks matching rows with a pen, beside a laptop, a calculator, a tablet and a green mug.

Buying softwareField note

AI can rewrite the old system now. Make it prove the numbers match.

OpenAI says its newest models can carry most COBOL programs in its own test to modern languages with identical output. Someone will offer to do that to your old system. Ask them to prove it prints the same numbers first.

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In a sunlit meeting room with tall windows onto trees, a reviewer with reading glasses pushed up on her head holds out a fan of blank test cards over a wooden table where an invoice lies with one corner folded in orange; a smiling young developer writes beside an open laptop, and a wall rail behind holds one card on four hooks.

AI & judgmentField note

Auditors are about to test what your AI agent actually does

An outside reviewer slips a doctored invoice into your finance agent's queue and writes down what it does next. That's roughly how the new AICPA and AIUC certification works, and most agents aren't built to be examined that way.

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Editorial engraving of a bright shipping dock where a planner with a cutoff sheet talks a driver through timing beside two tagged cartons and a waiting truck.

CommerceField note

A split shipment promise has to clear every carrier cutoff

Checkout offered split shipping so the in-stock item could leave today. The second carton still had to meet a carrier cutoff you never checked. One promise, two clocks.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny QA booth where a reviewer compares a soft waveform on screen to an empty task tray beside a silent phone.

AI in practiceField note

The transcript captured the call and lost the callback

The AI transcript looks complete: greeting, issue, empathy, wrap-up. The customer said call me tomorrow after three. That sentence never became a task.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny craft booth on Saturday with a marketplace operator at a calm desk consulting a weekend calendar instead of freezing orders.

CommerceField note

Weekend seller silence is not the same as abandoned orders

Saturday morning, twelve open orders, seller last active Thursday. Auto-hold treats that like abandonment. Sometimes it is just a weekend.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny municipal records counter where a clerk advances a status on her tablet as the requester, seated nearby, reads the update on her phone.

Buying softwareField note

The FOIA status page that never emails the requester

The portal says your records request moved to review. Nobody told the requester. They refresh the status page like a tracking number that never texts.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny receiving office where a lead hands a seasonal temp her own badge while another temp signs a roster, a sealed envelope hanging on the wall behind them.

OperationsField note

Seasonal temps should not share one vendor-portal password

October arrives, the staffing agency sends twelve names, and someone tapes the vendor-portal password to the monitor again. It feels faster than accounts. It is the wrong first move.

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Editorial engraving of a bright apartment and support desk where a customer opens a phone thread that matches the case already open for the support lead.

Product & engineeringField note

The support email should open the ticket they already have

Your email said we opened ticket 18422. The link opened the help home, then login, then a blank form. She already typed the story once. The app asked her to type it again.

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In a bright, airy returns room lined with shelves of parcels, an operations lead holds a clipboard and a small brass key as she talks with a colleague who has stopped working at his laptop beside an opened returned box; on the wall behind them a wooden key board has one empty hook.

AI & judgmentField note

Your agent can lose write access halfway through a refund. Then what?

Microsoft now treats AI agents as insiders whose access can shrink while they work. Picture a refund agent that loses the right to refund halfway through a return. Whether it stops cleanly is up to how it was built.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny returns desk where an associate checks a blank ledger and tablet while a customer returns part of a purchase beside a blank gift code card.

CommerceField note

What happens to the gift card after a partial return

She paid with a gift code, kept one item, sent the other back. Finance, support and the gift ledger each have a different idea of what refund means next.

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In a bright civic meeting room, a young engineer lifts one block out of a wooden tray of interchangeable modular parts while a replacement block waits in a small box beside it. Across the table a procurement officer takes notes in an open binder next to a rubber stamp and ink pad, with a laptop, a phone and a coffee cup on the table.

AI in practiceField note

The DeepSeek ban reaches what you built. Do you know which model is inside?

Homeland Security's DeepSeek order doesn't stop at DeepSeek's own app. It also covers third-party products built with DeepSeek, so anyone selling software to a civilian agency needs to know which model sits behind each feature.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit home and boutique doorway where a shopper pauses on her phone while a merchant receives a printed order slip at the counter.

ReviewsReview

Shop MCP review: any agent can shop, you still approve the card

Shopify's Shop MCP lets a personal AI agent search the catalog, build a checkout and use Shop Pay after the shopper confirms. For merchants, the order looks normal. The catalog and the approval step are what decide whether that is good news.

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Two colleagues in a sunlit studio lean over a hand-drawn map of a business's web systems. The main storefront sits bold at the center while one of them lifts the map's edge to uncover a small forgotten piece, with a ring of old keys nearby.

Product & engineeringField note

The agents didn't break your storefront. They found the page you forgot.

A researcher watched AI agents break into more than a hundred online stores last week. The surprising part is where they got in: not the storefront you watch, but the legacy page and the old backup nobody owns anymore.

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A good place to begin.

A familiar problem? Let’s look closer.

Tell us where you want to go. We’ll find the first thing worth changing.

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