Methods¶
Patterns I keep reaching for, written down so they can be reused, argued with, or discarded.
Each page states where the pattern came from, when it applies, and — the part usually missing — when it does not. A pattern derived from one engagement is a sample size of one, and every page says so where that is the case.
Working principles¶
The patterns below are downstream of four positions I hold about enterprise knowledge systems.
Meaning is the bottleneck, not retrieval. Retrieval quality is a solved-enough problem with commodity components. Whether an organisation agrees on what a number means is not, and no amount of model capability substitutes for that agreement.
Silent partial failure is the characteristic failure mode. A knowledge system that is 80% complete does not answer 80% of questions correctly. It answers confidently from an incomplete corpus, and nobody can tell which answers came from the missing 20%.
Evaluation is a product feature, not a testing activity. If the business cannot see measured quality on its own questions, the conversation stays an argument about demo impressions — and the demo always wins, right up until it does not.
Governance is a control system, not a document. A definition with no named owner drifts. A taxonomy nobody is accountable for is a glossary. The structural question is who gets paged when meaning breaks.
Patterns¶
| Pattern | What it solves | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Fail loud in knowledge systems | Confident answers from a silently incomplete corpus | Evergreen |
| Route by intent before reaching for a bigger model | Treating every question as a retrieval question | Evergreen |
| Competency questions as an evaluation gate | Quality arguments settled by impression rather than measurement | Evergreen |
| Evidence gates instead of a fixed scope | Funding a second demo instead of buying the next decision | Evergreen |
| Generating visuals without inventing facts | AI-generated diagrams that quietly contain a number you never measured | Evergreen |
Provenance¶
These patterns come primarily from one engagement — a knowledge platform for a global CPG manufacturer, described in Work — with earlier delivery experience informing the framing. They are not neutral surveys of the field. Where I am extrapolating past what I have personally run, the page says so.