Contextually Aware

A new paper proves what product builders have suspected: your system prompt is the least valuable part of your AI harness. The real wins come from tool architecture, middleware, and memory structure.

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

Google didn't release a smarter model at I/O 2026—it turned 12+ products into agent runtimes. The real story is distribution dominance, not AI capability.

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

The cheapest agent improvement happens before you build it. Write your eval first—it's the product spec that prevents plausible-but-untrustworthy outputs.

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

Your board is split on AI strategy. Luis breaks down the five investment motions—build, buy, borrow, hire, wait—and gives you the framework to pick the right one for each workflow.

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

Three startups shipped on schedule and hit milestones—then quietly vanished. The real moat isn't code; it's the relationship you build with customers.

Read the full article: https://growthalchemylab.com/blog/software-is-dead-long-live-services

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

Most agent failures aren't bugs—they're silent context drift happening after step five. Luis Calderon reveals why vector memory fails, and what actually fixes it.

Read the full article: https://growthalchemylab.com/blog/the-memory-failure-i-keep-seeing-in-agent-stacks

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

Luis Calderon maps the four failure modes that kill multi-agent systems before launch—and the fifth that breaks them in production. Most teams only fix the first three.

Read the full article: https://growthalchemylab.com/blog/the-four-places-multi-agent-systems-break

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

When a single blocked write action prevented disaster, one team learned that strategic approval gates—not blanket permissions—unlock true agent autonomy while keeping humans in control.

Read the full article: https://growthalchemylab.com/blog/we-blocked-one-write-action

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

Accenture built an AI agent in two weeks but took twelve months to ship it. The bottleneck wasn't technology—it was organizational. We explore the five tensions that predict whether enterprise agentic projects survive.

Read the full article: https://growthalchemylab.com/blog/enterprise-agentic-projects-doomed

This episode is in DRAFT and has not been published yet.

Your Code Is Trash Anyway—And That's the Whole Point

Short, sharp take on why specs beat prompts, models rewrite everything anyway, and product teams that store decisions—not code—are the ones who win.

Your code is going to be rewritten anyway. Models regenerate it. The next engineer rewrites it. Six months from now, nobody remembers why any decision was made. So why are you treating the code as the artifact?

This episode reframes how product teams should think about AI-generated output. The real leverage is in the spec, the decision, the reasoning — not the code itself. Slowest layer wins. Store the why, not the what.

Three moves you can apply this week

1. Every PR links to a decision, not a Jira card. One paragraph explaining why this code exists.
2. Review the spec, not the code. The code is now free. The expensive thing is the human judgment behind it.
3. Store reasoning where it's searchable. Six months from now, "read the code" is already a failure.

Where to find more

• Growth Alchemy Lab — short, opinionated takes on AI in product work, published every Monday.
• Contextually Aware — frameworks, code, and conversations with teams shipping AI products in the messy middle.

Send this to the person on your team who's still arguing about code review nits while the spec is the bottleneck.