KENNY CHIEN / BLOG
Field notes.
The operational record of the agentic era — what shipped, what broke, and what the token bill actually bought.
Field Notes is my blog on enterprise AI in production. It collects deployment write-ups, launch post-mortems, and working notes on agentic ontology and token economics — the things I learn while shipping, written down before the sting fades. Everything here comes from real engagements, not thought experiments.
The longer thesis essays live in Ideas, and recorded conversations live on the podcast. This page is the shorter, more practical companion to the consulting work itself. Posts appear in English or Chinese, whichever language the argument was born in; each one is labelled so you know before you click.
Everything here was learned in production — on real data, behind real permissions, with real users watching.
The latest post
Token 是成本单位，业务结果才是价值单位
Tokens are the cost unit. Business outcomes are the value unit.
The entire AI infrastructure chain — models, inference, chips, data centers — is repricing around tokens. Application companies must not worship them. This essay argues that the real dividend of the AI era is converting the right tokens, with the right model, context, and ontology, into measurable, reusable business outcomes — and gives enterprise buyers three questions for judging any AI application. Written in Simplified Chinese.
Read the essay →In progress
Three posts are on the desk right now. They are drafted from live engagement notes and will publish here when they are honest enough to defend. No links yet — nothing on this site points anywhere that does not exist.
Launching your first agentic app: a 90-day plan
The week-by-week sequence I run in an AI application launch — evals first, thin slice second, hardening third.
Five ontology mistakes that quietly break agents
Failure patterns from real agentic ontology reviews — none of them look like failures until an agent acts on them.
What I learned embedding as an FDE at a Fortune 100
Notes from a forward deployed engineering (FDE) embed — what survives contact with enterprise reality.
Notes & scripts
Not everything here will be a full essay. Shorter working notes and the scripts behind them — eval harnesses, prompt sets, launch checklists like the Agent Launch Checklist — will land on this page as they stabilize.
Get new posts by email →Common questions
What does the Field Notes blog cover?
Field Notes is Kenny Chien's blog on enterprise AI in production. It covers deployment write-ups, agentic application launches, agentic ontology in practice, token economics, and the working notes and scripts behind real engagements.
How is the blog different from the Ideas section?
Ideas holds the longer thesis essays — the arguments. Field Notes is the shorter, operational record: what shipped in a specific deployment, what broke, and what the fix was. Read Ideas for the why; read Field Notes for the how.
What languages are posts written in?
Posts appear in English or Chinese, whichever language the argument was born in. Every post is labelled with its language on this page, so you know before you click. The latest essay, on token economics, is in Simplified Chinese.
How do I get new posts?
There is no mailing-list machinery yet. Email kenny.chien@gmail.com with the subject "Subscribe to Field Notes" and you will get new posts by reply as they are published.
Want to argue with a post?
Replies are the best part of publishing. Send me the paragraph you disagree with — or the deployment story you think I should write up next.