Principal AI Developer and Tech Lead at @SASsoftware. Practical lessons about AI reliability, security and production engineering. CEO Award of Excellence.

Cary, NC
Joined January 2009
This paper highlights why model benchmarks are useless for production planning. If a database crashes you'll quickly get a triage ticket. If the orchestration layer drops context you might end up with some beautiful hallucination. That corrupted data can then flow onto your users. Quality degradation can be one of the most dangerous failure classes in production AI. Models, tools, retrieval pipelines, and orchestrators. There is a lot of scope for things to break. arxiv.org/abs/2610.02503
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The instinct of many teams is to build a single agent loaded with documentation for every subsystem. In demos it may look great, in production not so much. The engineering team at Meta found the single agent collapsed under context bloat. It routinely mixed up coding conventions, hallucinations crept into PRs and the system became brittle. Their solution was a thin orchestrator with specialized subagents across 20 workflows. Only the delegated task uses LLM reasoning. Selecting and invoking the subagent remains deterministic. Execution ordering lives in separate workflow templates that sequence subagents based on the objective. When the team needed to support full pipeline migrations, they did not retrain a model or write new agent code. They wrote a new declarative template reusing the existing subagent pool. Configuration prep for a new data column went from 3 to 4 days to under an hour. If a routing decision can be expressed as an if statement or regex then keep it in deterministic code. Save the LLM for the actual code synthesis inside isolated, specific subagents.
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When models fail in complex enterprise tasks, engineers often try to add more tools or upgrade the model. NVIDIA showed that you can actually improve reliability by doing the opposite: remove options, enforce strict interfaces, and constrain actions. They normalized everything to SQL. All incoming CSV, JSON, and tabular data was converted into a local SQLite database upfront. The agent was only given a single query interface which could write and execute SQL. Sometimes less is more.
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This is one of the reasons why I don't download skills from public GitHub repos. You risk opening yourself up to remote code execution, data exfiltration and credential theft. This isn't the first time this has been highlighted. In February 2026 a team of researchers discovered malicious skills in public repos. Over 36% contained at least one security issue. These skills should be treated like any other third-party dependency you pull into your code and demand the same security rigor. Various companies have released skill scanners to try and address this, like Snyk, Cisco and Nvidia, but a report by The Trails of Bits blog back in June showed none of these work for malicious skills like Python bytecode poisoning. It is better for organizations to create their own skills they can trust. edufabtech.com/news/skillsec…
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Security researchers found a flaw in the AWS metadata service which provides sensitive data like credentials. A single malicious prompt via a chatbot enabled them to compromise an entire agent fleet. They labeled it ‘AgentCorruption’, it’s since been patched. The advice from the team is to ensure role-specific privileges.
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Dean Taplin retweeted
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
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Dean Taplin retweeted
At an event celebrating 50 years of @SASsoftware, Chancellor Kevin Howell announced the launch of the SAS Think and Do Tank at NC State, which will integrate SAS’ data, AI and analytics expertise into interdisciplinary research through @NCStateCALS. 👏
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Dean Taplin retweeted
Read all about it: Chartis Research has awarded SAS a dozen solution category winners in the Chartis RiskTech100® 2027, while ranking SAS No. 3 overall among the world’s leading risk management solutions vendors. 2.sas.com/6011BGigzz
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Dean Taplin retweeted
See how AI-powered decisioning helps marketers deliver next-best actions, real-time engagement and continuous optimization at scale. Read The Marketer's Guide to AI and Decisioning: 2.sas.com/6019BGHpet #MarTech
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Traditional auto insurance pricing relies heavily on generalized linear models, which are explainable but can struggle to capture complex differences in customer behavior. This can produce overly broad tariffs, inaccurate premiums and lost sales. Neova Sigorta is using SAS Insurance Life Cycle Accelerator to combine GLMs with explainable machine learning, uncover more granular risk patterns and deliver faster, fairer and more personalized pricing, whilst improving proposal acceptance. sas.com/en_us/customers/neov…
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Dean Taplin retweeted
🛬 Most of us are unaware of all that goes into keeping things moving at the airport. Global airport manager, Fraport AG, uses SAS to help keep operations running as smoothly as possible. Read how 2.sas.com/6010BGTHWE #SASViya
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SAS Communities post that takes a look at the Agentic Product Configurator, part of the SAS Insurance Life Cycle Accelerator. It is built around a simple premise: product design should read like a conversation with a knowledgeable colleague, not a support ticket. communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-C…
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The SAS Agentic AI Accelerator provides a method for building AI agents leveraging SAS Viya technology. It is designed to help users move more quickly from use-case idea to production, utilizing No/Low/Yes Code interfaces and full governance as a way to build agents that balance autonomy and trust. github.com/sassoftware/sas-a…
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