Most conversations about AI sound like science fiction. Most conversations about operations sound like accounting. At Systems + Scale we live between the two — where you design systems that think with you, not just for you.

Mission:

Help leaders use AI to clarify their operations, not complicate them.

Who I am:

I’m James Ernst — Director of Strategic Operations at Rocket55 and creator of Systems + Scale. After 17 years in account management, client success and agency operations I found growth rarely fails for lack of ideas—it fails for lack of structure. Teams move fast, tools multiply, and suddenly nobody knows how work gets done. I started documenting the frameworks that turned chaos into clarity: Runbook-First Automation, SLA Reliability, Prune Friday, the OPS/AI Flywheel. These became the backbone of Systems + Scale—a field guide to AI-ready operations.

What “AI Ops” means here:

AI Ops isn’t about handing control to algorithms—it’s about designing systems that think with us, not for us.

In practice, that means:

What you’ll find here:

The articles, frameworks and templates you’ll see are built around two core questions:

  1. What’s the smallest reliable system we can build today?
  2. How does AI make it smarter tomorrow? Expect content you can use on Monday morning: how to choose what to automate, how to evaluate LLMs for operations, how to build observability into workflows, how to govern automation at scale. If it won’t work on Monday we don’t publish it.

Join the movement:

Each week you’ll get a short “Field Notes” piece—one principle in action. Subscribe to the newsletter and build your toolkit. The moment you hesitate because you’re asking “Can this run again this week?” you’ve moved from tool-hobbyist to AI Ops practitioner.

At Systems + Scale the future isn’t about chasing new tools—it’s about building systems that don’t break. Let’s build together.