SpiceFactory

Bumping retries from 1 to 2 makes CI greener. It does not make it more trustworthy.

Flaky E2E tests are usually not a browser problem. They are a systems problem that happens to show up in the browser: dependencies, data, time, state, UI coupling.

Five causes, five structural fixes, and why a pass on retry should never be a clean verdict. First post in our QA engineering series spicefactory.co/blog/flaky-e2e…

Most AI pilots demo beautifully and quietly die there. A couple get funded, everyone loves the screenshots, and a year later the board asks what came of them. The usual answer is nothing, because none of them reached production.

It almost never comes down to the model. The hard part was never making a demo work. It’s everything the demo skips: the messy real data, the evidence that it actually pays, the compliance path, and someone whose job is the outcome.

Another pilot won’t close that gap. Picking the one that matters and finishing it will.

New on the blog spicefactory.co/blog/the-ai-pi…

Token prices keep falling, but AI bills keep climbing, and finance wants the bill cut by a third.

In regulated work, that’s where it gets hard. The standard cost-cutting playbook has five levers, and four of them either break a compliance control or reopen a validation. Only one is actually safe to pull: trim context and retries.

The deeper problem: as tokens get cheaper, the fixed compliance half of the bill becomes a bigger share of the cost per decision, not a smaller one. The number to manage was never price per token. It’s cost per successful, defensible task.

New on the blog spicefactory.co/blog/four-of-t…

#RegulatedAI #FinOps #MLOps #HealthTech

In April, regulators rescinded SR 11-7 and carved generative and agentic AI out of its replacement — the one category of model that can hallucinate a number into a credit memo or act before anyone reviews it.

The rulebook disappeared. The liability didn't. Fair-lending law and your next exam didn't pause for the rewrite.

spicefactory.co/blog/model-ris…

#BankingAI #ModelRiskManagement #FinTech #GenAI #RegTech

Medical AI gets FDA-cleared, ships, and bills close to $0.

Clearance and reimbursement are two different fights. Radiology is ~80% of cleared AI, yet only 3 services hold a permanent CPT code.

Payers fund proven outcomes, not accuracy. You build that evidence at the pipeline.

spicefactory.co/blog/why-almos…

#HealthTech #MedicalAI #DigitalHealth #Reimbursement #FDA