FIELD NOTE / INSTAGRAM
The cost curve starts after launch.
The short film, the complete written thought, and the evidence behind it.
The cost curve starts after launch.
Video caption
The cost curve starts after launch.
The creator quietly becomes product support.
Use a short trial with failure and support logs.
A product needs an owner even if AI wrote its code.
#EricFieldNotes
Full written post / accessible read
The first graph looks amazing: a useful internal tool appears in a day. The second graph is the one leaders miss. Each exception asks someone to stop their real work, reconstruct the agent's choices and supervise another repair cycle.
Imagine a sales operator builds an intake portal with an agent. It works for the launch path. A permission issue, old record and export mismatch arrive later. The operator spends afternoons re-prompting and retesting instead of serving accounts. The software expense looks small because that time is booked elsewhere.
For a trial, log the agent spend, owner intervention time, missed core-work time, incidents and users who now depend on it. Compare with a maintained tool that performs the same job. The decision does not need a perfect forecast; it needs the hidden costs on the same page.
Approve an internal build only with a named owner, maintenance budget, acceptance tests and a retire-or-replace trigger. Otherwise, buy the small maintained tool and keep people on their actual job. Do this because the first working screen does not finance the next year of exceptions.
#EricFieldNotes
Evidence and boundary
On-screen label: ILLUSTRATIVE COST CURVE. Illustrative cases are not measured incidents. Research papers and vendor documents support the stated mechanism only within their studied or documented scope.