Insights
Notes from the build.
Written for the people who will have to run these systems. Specific enough to disagree with, which is the point.
Latest
Six decisions that decide whether a system survives.
History, contracts, chunking, permission inheritance, abstention and evaluation design. None of them are the model or the warehouse tool, and all of them are where the projects we get called into have already gone wrong.
Data modelling · 6 min
Slowly changing dimensions are a per-attribute decision
Tracking history on everything is not caution. It is how a warehouse becomes something analysts route around.
Platform engineering ·
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Data quality · 5 min
A contract that cannot stop a load is not a contract
A test that turns a tile amber and nothing else is documentation. A breach has to block a load or page an owner.
Platform engineering ·
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Retrieval · 6 min
Chunking is a decision, not a default
The 512-token window is the most consequential unexamined choice in most retrieval systems. Here is how to examine it.
Retrieval engineering ·
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Architecture · 7 min
What permission inheritance actually requires
Filtering results after retrieval is not access control. It is a leak with a user interface.
Platform engineering ·
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Evaluation · 5 min
Abstention is a feature
A system that answers everything is a system nobody can rely on. The refusal is what makes the answers usable.
Evaluation and assurance ·
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Evaluation · 6 min
Your evaluation set is too big, and too small
Two hundred stratified questions will find regressions ten thousand unstratified ones will miss. Coverage is a shape, not a count.
Evaluation and assurance ·
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Talk to us.
A first conversation runs about forty-five minutes and covers three things: what your estate actually looks like, whether anyone can define a correct answer or an agreed number, and whether your permission model resolves per user. Any one of them can rule the work out, and we would rather tell you in week one.
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- hello@vectisflow.com
- Response time
- One working day, from a person who has read it.