Stratagems #15: Derek and Alex Shared One Server. ACL's AI Was Listening to Both.
When the enemy occupies favorable terrain, don't attack head-on. Use a decoy to lure the tiger down the mountain. Then take the mountain. — The 36 Stratagems, Lure the Tiger Down the Mountain Previously on this series: #2: Derek Shaw Walked Into Another AI Promise. The Pipeline Had a Better Plan. — Derek lost the Finova contract at QualiGuard. In the parking lot, Lena turned back before getting in her car: "Next time you put together a proposal — make sure your boss knows what you're doing out there." That line followed him. At MediSys he nearly made the same mistake. Fixed the ETL pipeline instead of the model, beat OmniDx with their own white paper. But VP Morgan still saw through him: he still hadn't told his boss. #8: Alex Watched an AI Dashboard Take Over. He Kept the Keys Under the Table. — MedTech signed a seven-figure AI operations monitoring system. Alex was assigned as training lead. Under everyone's noses, he built a second monitoring panel labeled "training environment." Three weeks later the vendor dashboard went down. Alex's hidden panel was the only one still running. The first time Alex and Derek really talked, and it wasn't in a working group. At the FHIR standards committee quarterly meeting, they sat in the same row, three seats apart, and voted against the same proposal. They knew each other's names. That was it. Two months later, Derek was fixing a partition config in the staging environment. MediSys had just signed a major hospital; the AI diagnostic validation platform was in integration testing. He found an unrotated log directory in /etc/logrotate.d/ with a prefix that didn't match MediSys's naming convention. He traced it upstream. One server. Labeled "temporary data exchange node." MedTech's supply chain order stream and MediSys's diagnostic validation records were sitting in the same directory. Write permissions hadn't been restricted. The hospital's integration spec had a line saying "both parties are recommended to complete data alignme