Notes on practical AI, California labor compliance, and the work itself.
About two posts a month. Long essays and short field notes, alternating. No SaaS-blog chrome. Subscribe by RSS or check back when it suits you.
- May 13, 2026·Implementation
The two-week diagnostic: what an AI readiness assessment actually looks like.
Anatomy of Floburn's standard two-week diagnostic engagement. Stage check, current-state map, recommendations, scope for the build. Includes what we don't do.
By Floburn - May 6, 2026·Compliance
What the LWDA February 2026 proposed regulations actually change.
California's labor enforcement agency raised the documentary proof bar for the reasonable-steps PAGA defense. Here's what the proposed regulations actually require employers to produce.
By Floburn - April 29, 2026·Compliance
The §226 wage statement is where the dollars actually live.
PAGA gets the headlines. §226 wage statement penalties get the recovery. A reframe of California wage-and-hour exposure as a stacked recovery, not a single penalty.
By Floburn - April 22, 2026·Field notes
Field note: the spreadsheet that ate the agent.
Six months in, the AI agent was working. The spreadsheet behind it was not. A short note on what happens when a shared Google Sheet is the source of truth for production work.
By Jaime Florence - April 15, 2026·Implementation
What integration debt costs in year two.
The connector you didn't build in week six is the line item that compounds in month eighteen. The real cost of 'we'll wire it up later' in AI projects.
By Aaron Burns - April 8, 2026·Teardowns
Reading an AI vendor deck: a teardown.
Three claims that show up in almost every AI vendor pitch, and the questions that reveal which version of those claims actually ships.
By Aaron Burns - April 1, 2026·Compliance
Donohue, four years on: what the per-period attestation actually looks like.
California's meal-period defense has lived or died on the per-pay-period record since 2021. Four years after Donohue v. AMN Services, here's what surviving the rebuttable presumption looks like in operating terms.
By Floburn - March 25, 2026·Implementation
The Harness Map
Five stages of how a business actually uses AI, and the cliff between two and three where most companies stop short.
By Floburn - March 18, 2026·Field notes
Field note: the foreman who refused the tablet.
Construction-tech adoption friction is almost never resistance to change. It's a tool that destroyed a working trust ritual nobody on the vendor side noticed.
By Floburn - March 11, 2026·Failure modes
Why your AI pilot stalled at the demo.
Six failure modes we keep finding when we're called in to revive AI pilots that already failed. Every one is foreseeable. None of them show up in the demo.
By Aaron Burns - March 4, 2026·Compliance
The 15% PAGA cap doesn't apply itself.
The 2024 PAGA reform lets California employers cap penalties at 15% — if they can document reasonable steps. Most can't. The dollar-value math of that gap.
By Floburn - February 25, 2026·Compliance
The bilingual attestation question
A meal-break attestation signed in a language the employee doesn't read defeats the purpose of the attestation. What 'comprehension' means under California labor law, when bilingual content is required, and why most attestation programs we audit fail the test.
By Floburn - February 18, 2026·Compliance
§3395 outdoor heat: what 'reasonable steps' looks like at 90 degrees.
Cal/OSHA's outdoor heat regulation doesn't care about averages — it cares about specific shifts on specific sites. The operational shape of compliance, why it's a §2699 predicate, and what the documentary record has to capture.
By Floburn - February 11, 2026·Compliance
The §2802 expense reimbursement gap
PAGA matters surface in stacks. The §226 wage statement layer pays the dollars. The §226.7 meal-and-rest layer is the most-cited theory. The §2802 expense reimbursement layer is the one most employers don't know they have.
By Floburn - February 4, 2026·Compliance
What an LWDA notice actually looks like.
A PAGA notice is a 3-to-6 page document. Most of it is templated. The substance occupies maybe a single page, and that page determines every clock the employer is now running. A walkthrough of the literal anatomy.
By Floburn - January 28, 2026·Failure modes
The Stage 2.5 trap
Companies that recognize they're stuck at Stage 2 of the Harness Map but try to cross the cliff by buying more Stage 2 tools. Why this fails, why it's the most common failure mode we see in mid-market AI investment, and what crossing the cliff actually requires.
By Floburn - January 21, 2026·Field notes
Field note: the PAGA notice that arrived on a Friday.
Four of the 33 cure-window days disappeared between Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning. A short note on the operational shape of receiving a PAGA notice the wrong way.
By Floburn - January 14, 2026·Implementation
When AI shouldn't be the answer.
About a third of the diagnostic engagements we run recommend AI for the wrong workflow — and conventional software, process redesign, or hiring for the workflow the client asked us about. Three patterns where AI is the expensive way to solve the problem.
By Aaron Burns - January 7, 2026·Teardowns
How to read an AI implementation contract.
Six clauses that show up in nearly every AI vendor SOW. Three protect you. Three protect the vendor. Knowing which is which is the difference between a contract you can defend and a contract you have to live with.
By Aaron Burns - December 31, 2025·Field notes
Field note: the dashboard that didn't surface the drift.
The pager went off at 2:14am. The dashboard said the lead-scoring agent was healthy. Four weeks later, we found out the dashboard had been measuring the wrong thing the whole time.
By Jaime Florence - December 24, 2025·Implementation
Why we don't run open-ended consulting engagements.
A consulting firm's pricing tells you what it thinks about its own product. Time-and-materials retainers and fixed-scope diagnostics are not just different price models — they are different theories of what's being sold.
By Aaron Burns