Fit for Purpose

Sign in Subscribe

tanner stahl

The Word "Hallucination" Is Doing Too Much Work

I spent the first stretch of my career in bioengineering, then in quality engineering on FDA-regulated medical devices. In that world, "biologically inspired" is not a finished thought, but more so the start of one. Before a biological analogy can justify anything about how a device works,

Testing Zuckerberg's Infrastructure Argument

The claim On August 11, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg published a note arguing that the United States is losing the AI infrastructure race to China. His core evidence: "Countries like China are bringing online 1GW+ of nuclear capacity every other week, so we will need to accelerate building both energy

From 36% to 79%: Testing LLMs for Clinical Trial Matching

Twenty-five patient-trial pairs went through this pipeline. Not one came back eligible. That includes the patient I built specifically to pass. The reason wasn't a bug. Every trial had at least one criterion the system couldn't resolve, usually something requiring investigator judgment. The pipeline

Architecting an Agent Around a Data Moat

The company below, Meridian, is a composite. It isn't a real business, and nothing here describes an actual client engagement. Meridian is a B2B marketplace that connects buyers and suppliers across a fragmented industrial category. Its product is fine. Its moat isn't the product. It'

2026's Agent Sprawl Data

Ninety-seven percent of organizations say they're exploring agentic AI. Half of them rate their own capability as advanced or expert. Only twelve percent have a centralized platform to actually control what any of it is doing. That's from a 2026 OutSystems survey of 1,900

Neither of These Papers Cites the Other

Two pieces of AI research from 2025 started from very different ideas about how an agent can fail, and ended up pointing toward surprisingly similar practical controls. Here's the case for why they belong next to each other. The first is Anthropic's Agentic Misalignment research, which

Your Agent Can Tell It's a Demo

The gap between an agent that works and an agent that's allowed to work is where most of the real engineering happens. Almost nobody talks about it publicly, because it's unglamorous and specific to whatever internal process a given company runs. But there's a

About

Tanner Stahl Product | AI Engineering & Data Science I write about what it takes to get predictive models and AI agents through review and into production, specifically in industries where mistakes are expensive and often take months to surface. Most AI writing treats deployment as an afterthought: build the model,