FN / FIELD NOTES
Short essays on applied AI, systems thinking, practical workflows, and creative engineering, written by Matt MacDougall, founder of Guidance Systems.
FN-12 / SECURITY
2026.07.27 · 6 min
Kimi K3 runs unrestricted and private in the US, close to the frontier and without the guardrails every closed model ships. One researcher used it to find twenty unknown flaws in Redis in a day and a half. That cuts both ways, and it is the best defense most small businesses have.
FN-11 / OWNERSHIP
2026.07.22 · 5 min
A frontier model went dark for nineteen days after an export order, with no say for anyone building on it. Open weights have no such switch. Forty-seven countries already treat that as strategy, not idealism.
FN-10 / ECONOMICS
2026.07.17 · 5 min
A homeschool app, a five dollar monthly AI ceiling, and the arithmetic that picked open weights: one point behind the frontier at a fifth of the price, with answers in a second and a half instead of thirty.
FN-09 / SIGNAL
2026.07.02 · 4 min
Security tools drown operators in alarms that mean nothing. SquirrelOps plants a fabric of lies through a network instead, and since no honest person ever touches a decoy, every alert is a fact, not a probability.
FN-08 / METHOD
2026.06.24 · 4 min
Hire a firm for AI help and you usually get a plan. A Mission Map gives you something more useful: an honest read of where your business actually is, the few places AI would change an outcome, and the one move worth making first.
FN-07 / PRACTICE
2026.06.11 · 4 min
The best AI opportunities are not the ones executives name or vendors sell. They hide in the workflows you have stopped seeing, and finding them is the real work.
FN-06 / STRATEGY
2026.06.09 · 4 min
The Fortune 500 AI playbook does not fit a 30-person business, or a 300-person one. The alternative is smaller, sharper, and built for the way SMBs actually run.
FN-05 / DECISION
2026.06.02 · 5 min
AI is being recommended for everything right now. Most of those recommendations are wrong. Ten signals that AI is the wrong tool, and what to do instead.
FN-04 / METHOD
2026.05.27 · 5 min
Every applied AI engagement runs through the same five stages. The Guidance Loop is the operating model of the practice, and the reason useful systems ship instead of stalling.
FN-01 / APPLIED AI
2026.05.25 · 5 min
Automation is useful, but the larger opportunity is guidance, systems that help teams see, think, decide, and create better.
FN-02 / SYSTEMS
2026.05.25 · 5 min
A business is always moving along a trajectory. A guidance system helps see where it is, where it is headed, and what needs to change.
FN-03 / CRAFT
2026.05.25 · 5 min
The clean diagram is never the whole system. Useful AI work requires more than technical knowledge. It requires taste.