OptimalARC · Field notes
The Hard 70%
Field notes on AI reliability, pattern discovery, and shipping agents that survive real production, from the team building the Pattern Intelligence Layer.
Customer Support
Why do customer-support AI agents fail in production, and how do you make them reliable?
A support agent that confidently quotes a policy that does not exist is not a small bug. One Canadian tribunal made an airline honor a refund its chatbot invented. Here is why support agents fail, and the controls that make them safe to deploy.
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
What is a retry death spiral, and how do I stop it?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why did my agent's cost explode when it moved from pilot to production?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why do over-broad tool permissions turn one injection into a full breach?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
What is indirect prompt injection, and why can't the model just ignore it?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why does my agent repeat the same step in a loop?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why do multi-agent systems fail more often than a single agent?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why do small per-step error rates cause large multi-step agent failures?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why does my agent report success when the action never actually happened?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why does switching embedding models silently break my agent's retrieval?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Why Does My AI Agent Hallucinate When the Data Exists in My Database?
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
My Calendar Bot Was Supposed To Take One Evening
Balagei G Nagarajan8 min read
AI Drift Detection: How to Catch Behavioral Drift Before Users Do
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
Edge Case Discovery: Finding the Production Scenarios Your Tests Miss
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
OptimalARC vs DataRobot, LangChain, and Arize: Production Reliability Compared
Balagei G Nagarajan9 min read
The Third Question Nobody Asks About Your AI Team
Balagei G Nagarajan6 min read
What 150 CXO Conversations Taught Me About the Patterns Under the Patterns
Balagei G Nagarajan8 min read
How to Get AI From Prototype to Production
Balagei G Nagarajan8 min read
The 7 Layers of AI Reliability: A Complete Framework
Balagei G Nagarajan12 min read
Pattern Discovery vs Model Training: Why Most AI Teams Start Wrong
Balagei G Nagarajan6 min read
Zero Data Exposure AI: Why On-Premise Matters for Enterprise
Balagei G Nagarajan7 min read
The Hard 70%: What 150+ CXO Interviews Taught Me About Why AI Teams Get Stuck
Balagei G Nagarajan5 min read
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New writing on AI reliability, pattern discovery, and what actually breaks when agents meet production. No noise.
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