Engineering Notes

Engineering Notes

Thoughts and Ideas on AI by Muthukrishnan
26 Jun 2026

The Race: Why Flow Beats Local Efficiency

A practical reading of Eliyahu Goldratt's The Race, and why AI transformation should focus on bottlenecks, throughput, and flow instead of local productivity.
24 Jun 2026

Agent Loops Explained: The Simple Pattern Behind Useful AI Agents

A practical explanation of agent loops, how they differ from single-pass LLM calls, and why the simple think-act-observe cycle powers useful AI agents.
24 Jun 2026

The Doorman Fallacy and Why AI Keeps Failing at Replacing People

In 2023, AI was going to replace programmers. A year later, customer support was next. By 2025, some executives had mov...
23 Jun 2026

Optimize Units of Work, Not Growth Targets

Growth becomes more actionable when leaders stop treating it as a target and start removing friction from the individual units of work that create it.
18 Jun 2026

AI Will Not Kill Junior Engineers but It Will Change Them

There is a growing debate in software teams: If AI can generate most entry-level coding work, do we still need junior ...
17 Jun 2026

Cloudflare Email for Agents: Why Email May Become Agent Infrastructure

Cloudflare's Email for Agents is less about email and more about giving AI agents identity, memory, and a universal communication channel.
13 Jun 2026

Engineering Digital Twin - The Next Billion-Dollar AI Category

Why the biggest AI opportunity in software engineering is not code generation, but a living model of the engineering organization that helps leaders make better decisions
01 Jun 2026

You Sped Up Engineering. Why Isn't Revenue Moving?

A practical roadmap of the core engineering problems that must be solved before AI agents become reliable, scalable, secure, and economically useful systems.
25 May 2026

The Unsolved Engineering Problems of AI Agents

A practical roadmap of the core engineering problems that must be solved before AI agents become reliable, scalable, secure, and economically useful systems.
15 Mar 2026

Working Memory Compression and Context Distillation in Long Horizon Agents

How long-running agents compress, distill, and selectively retain working memory to operate effectively within finite context windows