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Principles field notes.
All Joust field notes tagged Principles.
Workflow-First. Why Most AI Pilots Stall Before They Ship.
Companies that have tried AI usually share a pattern: a high-energy pilot, real engineering effort, and then nothing in production six months later. The model is rarely the bottleneck.
Ron Davis
May 20, 2026
Tools second
There are 8,000 AI tools on the market. Picking one before you understand the work is how you end up with eight subscriptions and zero hours saved.
Honesty as a deliverable
The most valuable thing we hand a client isn't a roadmap. It's the answer they were already half-suspecting but no one had said out loud.
Ron Davis
Feb 20, 2026