Case file 01
The rock that was a bird
One camera logged 179 birds in three days. The checking model agreed with every one of them. Both were wrong, for different reasons.
Case files
Real problems, briefed properly
Each file is something that actually went wrong, or needed building, in the AI system that runs our house. They are told the way I would brief them at work: the problem, the evidence, the fix, and what I do differently now.
A note on credit. The system is a joint project with my husband, and AI coding agents write most of its code. What is mine in these files is the part that matters to an employer: the question asked, the evidence demanded, and the decision made.
Case file 02
The camera detects. A second model decides.
Rebuilding the notification feed so that a wrong label never reaches a phone, and finding a silent failure that had been hiding a total outage.
Case file 03
Twenty times faster by moving one thing
Camera vision took up to two minutes a frame. The fix was not a bigger model or more memory. It was asking the right question about the hardware.
Case file 04
The dryer is done, says the television
Small mercies, engineered properly: laundry announcements, a doorbell that takes over the screen, and an intercom that answers back.
Case file 05
The search index that was quietly rotting
My study desk's search depended on a paid service with a shutdown date. Nothing looked broken, and nothing would have looked broken afterwards either.
Case file 06
The rules the AI cannot argue with
Read-only by default, every change briefed in plain language first, and a guard that blocks destructive commands no matter how politely they are phrased.
"A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence."