Engineering Notes

Engineering Notes

Thoughts and Ideas on AI by Muthukrishnan
10 Apr 2026

Least Commitment Planning How Agents Defer Decisions to Stay Flexible

Explore least-commitment planning, a strategy where agents build partial-order plans to stay flexible and enable targeted repair when execution fails
09 Apr 2026

Least Privilege and Capability Containment Designing Agents That Cannot Exceed Their Mandate

How to apply the principle of least privilege to AI agents through tool allowlisting, permission tiers, and sandboxed execution environments that enforce safety at the architecture level.
02 Apr 2026

Mechanism Design Teaching Agents to Cooperate Through Incentives

How to design rules that make self-interested agents collectively produce desirable outcomes, with applications to LLM-based multi-agent systems
30 Mar 2026

Indirect Prompt Injection How Untrusted Content Hijacks AI Agents

How indirect prompt injection attacks compromise AI agents, why agentic systems are uniquely vulnerable, and the defense patterns that actually work.
26 Mar 2026

Landmark Based Planning Using Obligatory Subgoals to Guide Search

How landmark-based heuristics guide classical and LLM planners by identifying facts that must be true in every valid plan
23 Mar 2026

Mixture of Agents Building Collaborative LLM Pipelines That Outperform Any Individual Model

How layered LLM collaboration in the Mixture-of-Agents architecture produces outputs that consistently outperform any single model, and how to build it.
20 Mar 2026

Corrigibility and Interruptibility Building Agents That Accept Human Override

How to design AI agents that accept correction, allow safe interruption, and remain under human control even as their capabilities grow
19 Mar 2026

Receding Horizon Planning and Plan Commitment in Agent Reasoning Loops

How agents manage the tradeoff between committing to a plan and staying responsive to new information using receding horizon planning
18 Mar 2026

Dependency Aware Task Scheduling How Agents Execute Plans as Parallel DAGs

How agents represent plans as dependency graphs and execute independent tasks in parallel for better performance and fault tolerance
17 Mar 2026

Anytime Heuristic Search How Agents Find Good Plans Fast and Improve Them Over Time

Anytime heuristic search, including Weighted A* and ARA*, lets agents commit to a suboptimal plan immediately and refine it as time allows, with provable bounds on solution quality at every step.