/// Field notes

From the workshop.

Engineering write-ups from the teams building Protocore systems — payments, AI, and the custom hardware they run on. No noise, just how the work is actually done.

Engineering · Jun 2026

Designing offline-tolerant payment terminals

What it takes to clear transactions when the network drops.

AI · May 2026

Evals before features

How we keep LLM features honest in production.

Hardware · May 2026

From breadboard to OEM run

A field guide to taking custom electronics to volume.

Engineering · Mar 2026

Idempotency keys: making payment APIs safe to retry

Why a timed-out charge doesn't have to mean a double charge.

Engineering · Apr 2026

Reconciliation by design: ledgers that always balance

Building books that balance by construction, not by month-end cleanup.

AI · Feb 2026

Retrieval that holds up: chunking, reranking, and eval gates

What separates a RAG demo from a system that answers correctly.

Engineering · Jan 2026

Auditing smart contracts: reentrancy, invariants, and formal checks

Where the real bugs hide in immutable, adversarial code.

Hardware · Jun 2026

OTA firmware updates that don't brick the fleet

Updating devices you can't physically reach, without losing any.

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