Chris Boyd: AI Engineer
Production AI That Holds Up.
I build production AI systems, agentic workflows, and automation platforms for work where failure is expensive. My focus is the hard part of applied AI: architecture, permissions, guardrails, observability, and the engineering required to make autonomous software reliable.
As founder of Apptitude, I’ve spent two decades shipping production software across mobile, enterprise, and AI systems. I write about the gap between impressive demos and systems that survive real users, real data, and real consequences.
Recently
The Model Isn't the Moat
Notes from AI//FORWARD and a leadership-development talk: why the companies winning with agentic AI aren't winning on model selection, and what they're building around it instead.
How I Evaluate an AI Tool Before I Trust It in Production
Most AI tool evaluations stop at "does it work in the demo." Here's the framework I actually use before trusting something in a production system.
The Southeast Doesn't Need Permission to Build
The assumption that serious tech work only happens in San Francisco, New York, or Seattle is wrong — and increasingly expensive to believe. A practitioner's case for building in the Southeast by choice.
Your AI Agent Didn't Go Rogue. You Gave It the Keys.
Why the Cursor/Railway incident wasn't a vendor failure - it was an architecture gap. How to prevent AI agents from accessing permissions they shouldn't have, and why ownership matters.