At Just After Midnight I help teams take AI from a demo notebook to something they can actually run: retrieval pipelines over their own data, evaluation harnesses that gate deploys, and agent surfaces with real guardrails.
The shape of the work has been surprisingly consistent: find the retrieval truth first, wire up a golden set second, and only then touch the prompt. Cost ceilings and drift alarms ship together with the feature, not after it. I didn't invent this order; I learned it the slow way so my clients don't have to.
Client work details stay client-side, of course. The playbooks and habits are what I enjoy teaching.