Notes from building GRADE
How we think about deterministic screening, provenance, and keeping a human on every send.
“Always learning” is a bug, not a feature
In a regulated industry, software that changes its own behaviour is software nobody can validate.
What we do not claim
A short list of things our product does not do, published deliberately.
Why every number shows the sentence it came from
A specification you cannot trace is a rumour. Our extraction rejects values it cannot quote.
Mean particle size is not the number that matters
A grade with a perfect average can still fail. Here is the distinction that costs sample cycles.
The knowledge nobody wrote down
Roughly a quarter of the chemical manufacturing workforce can retire within five years. Most of what they know exists only in their heads.
How we test, in public
Our test methodology, including the parts that are not finished. If you evaluate vendors for a living, this page is for you.
The most important part of our product is not AI
The step that decides whether a product is eliminated contains no model judgment at all. That is deliberate.
What a six-hour technical inquiry actually looks like
An inquiry arrives in two sentences. Answering it well takes most of a working day. Here is where the time goes.