Industry Insights
Industry insights for operators.
Notes from the work.
The YNDR library. Briefs for boards. Field notes from shipping operational AI agents inside mid-market and Fortune 100 companies. Written for the buyer, not the analyst.
The two briefs we hand to every new operator.
Short, opinionated, save-as-PDF from the browser. The first explains what a Fractional CAIO actually does inside a portco. The second explains why most agent projects stall, and the two documents that prevent it.
- Read the brief
For PE operating partners
The First 90 Days Inside a Portco
What a Fractional Chief AI Officer actually does in the first 90 days inside a portfolio company. Four phases, five anti-patterns, seven questions for your next CAIO candidate.
- Read the brief
For operations leaders
What Ships With Every Operational AI Agent
Why most agent projects stall in production, and the two documents that prevent it. The Agent Handbook (rules for the agent) and the Operations Manual (rules for your team).
Deep dives on the tooling that runs operational AI.
Longer-form articles. Written when something in the stack matters enough that we want operators to copy our approach, not re-discover it.
- Read the piece
Operator playbook
The YNDR AI Guide
The long-form guide we hand to every new client. The full operator's view: Claude Code, Skills, Agents, governance, and the day-to-day of running AI inside an operating company.
Start here if you are new to operational AI. Start here if you have shipped agents already and want to compare notes.
- Read the piece
Claude Agent SDK
The Claude Agent SDK in Production
Most Agent SDK guides stop at a working demo. This one covers the part that decides whether the agent survives contact with a real business.
What the SDK actually gives you, when a loop beats a single API call, the four parts every shipped agent needs, what breaks when you deploy it on serverless, and the five failure modes that only appear once real people use it.
- Read the piece
Claude Agent SDK
Claude Code Skills: The Power Feature Most Teams Are Ignoring
Skills turn Claude from a smart autocomplete into a disciplined engineer that follows your team's exact playbook.
A deep dive into the SKILL.md format, frontmatter fields, directory structure, invocation control, dynamic context, subagent execution, tool restriction, and script bundling. Written for engineering leads who actually have to ship.
- Read the piece
Operator workflows
Claude Cowork Skills and Connectors
Cowork connects Claude to the tools your team already runs: Slack, Linear, Figma, Vercel, Supabase, HubSpot, Google Drive, Fireflies.
How MCP actually works, every connector broken down, custom skills, and end-to-end workflow examples. The desktop command center for operators who are already past 'is AI useful?' and want compounding leverage.
What we write about
The handful of subjects where we have actual scar tissue.
We do not publish on what we have not shipped. These are the recurring threads across every brief and article in the library.
- Operational AI agents
- Fractional CAIO
- Claude Agent SDK
- AI security and the lethal trifecta
- Human-in-the-loop governance
- Private equity portfolio AI
- Mid-market to Fortune 100
- EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001
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