Journal

Operating Principles

14 posts tagged “Operating Principles”

Self-Hosting Fails for Want of a Rule, Not Money

Five excellent free tools sat unadopted for years. The blocker was never cost. It was the absence of a place to put them and a rule for letting them in.

2026-08-15 · 3 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Governance

Silence Is Not Consent

An AI agent asked permission, got no answer, and invented the approval it needed. The governance fix: build the gate so silence blocks, for agents and for people.

2026-07-10 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Strategy

When the Build Muscle Outran the Human Layer

AI removed the production constraint from my business. The bottleneck moved to the human layer: the call, the signature, the payment. Building faster no longer helps.

2026-07-09 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

Project Readiness

The Ladder Where Only Proof Buys a Rung

A confidence ladder for project readiness with one rule: only a proof action buys a rung, a document does not. How to stop mistaking preparation for position.

2026-07-08 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

Automation

Twelve Routines Went Dark and the Dashboard Stayed Green

Twelve automated routines stopped running for two weeks and nothing alerted me. Presence-based monitoring cannot see the job that never runs. Watch for absence.

2026-07-07 · 5 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Evaluation

Why I Did Not Switch to the Model That Scored Higher

A newer AI model beat my baseline on aggregate score. I kept the old one. Gated dimensions beat weighted averages when some failures are unrecoverable.

2026-07-06 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Workflow

Size the Fuse to the Furnace, Not the Candle

A global safety limit must be calibrated against your heaviest known run before you trust it. The dangerous default is the one too tight to survive your normal worst case.

2026-07-05 · 5 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

Productisation

Productise the Second Time, Not the First

The right moment to turn work into a reusable product is not when you imagine doing it again. It is the moment you have done it once, well, with the proof still warm.

2026-07-02 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Workflow

AI Gives You Plausible Defaults, Not Correct Answers

Capable AI fails by producing fluent, confident output that is wrong against your specific data. The verification layer is not overhead. It is the job.

2026-06-28 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Governance

Disposition the Fleet, Not the Alert

A scan that hands you 85 high-risk findings has not reduced your risk. It has created 85 decisions. Here is how to disposition all of them in one sitting.

2026-06-26 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Workflow

Loop Engineering: What Running Fifty-Odd Agents Taught Me About the Verifier

I ran fifty-odd autonomous agents before I had a name for it. The hard part was never the work. It was the verifier, and finance solved it a century ago.

2026-06-24 · 10 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Workflow

Telemetry-First Sub-Agent Dispatch Saved Me 18 Minutes on a Quota Cliff

Write a JSONL event before each sub-agent fires, and another after it completes. Six lines of Python turn a quota interrupt into a targeted retry of only what failed.

2026-05-27 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

AI Workflow

Why I Deleted the Anthropic SDK From My Workflow

If your orchestration lives inside Claude Code, sub-agent dispatch bills against the subscription you already pay for. The SDK needs a separate console relationship. I picked wrong, then corrected.

2026-05-27 · 6 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA

Operating Principles

Your Role Is Becoming a Skill (and the Org Chart Hasn't Caught Up)

PM, design, engineering, accounting were roles. Now they are skills any operator deploys as needed. The hiring market, the comp ladder, and the org chart have not priced this in yet.

2026-05-25 · 9 min read · Teh Kim Guan, ACMA, CGMA