Patenting Your ML Pipeline: A Software Engineer's Guide to USPTO Flowcharts

Patenting Your ML Pipeline: A Software Engineer's Guide to USPTO Flowcharts So you built something novel. Maybe it's a retrieval pipeline that actually keeps hallucinations under control. Maybe it's a distributed training scheduler that shaves 30% off your GPU hours. Maybe it's just a clever cache eviction strategy that your team thinks is obvious but no one else has shipped. Someone in leadership says the word: "We should patent this." And suddenly you — the engineer who actually knows how the