Engineering Notes

Engineering Notes

Thoughts and Ideas on AI by Muthukrishnan
11 Oct 2025

Lead with Leading Indicators to Predict Problems Before They Happen

Most engineering managers are firefighters. They react to outages, missed deadlines, and team burnout after the damage ...
11 Oct 2025

Teaching Agents to Learn from Mistakes Through Reflection and Self-Critique

## Concept Introduction **Reflection** in AI agents is a meta-cognitive process where the agent: 1. Executes an actio...
10 Oct 2025

Prompt Chaining and Workflow Orchestration for Reliable Multi-Step Agents

When you ask an AI to perform a complex task like "analyze this dataset and create a comprehensive report with visualiz...
10 Oct 2025

The Multiplier Mindset for Identifying and Amplifying Force Multipliers

Most engineering managers operate in **addition mode**: hire another engineer, add another process, create another meet...
09 Oct 2025

Architect Your Culture with Decision Records

Most engineering managers focus on making good decisions. The best ones focus on **capturing why decisions were made**....
09 Oct 2025

Behavior Trees for Modular Decision-Making in AI Agents

## Concept Introduction A **Behavior Tree** (BT) is a mathematical model of plan execution represented as a directed a...
08 Oct 2025

Hierarchical Task Networks for Planning with Decomposition

## Concept Introduction **Hierarchical Task Networks (HTN)** planning works by decomposing abstract goals into progres...
08 Oct 2025

Make Decisions Reversible

One of the highest-leverage skills you can develop as an engineering manager is **designing your decisions to be revers...
07 Oct 2025

Build Escalation Paths, Not Firefighters

The best engineering managers don't pride themselves on being heroic problem-solvers. They build systems that prevent p...
07 Oct 2025

Intelligent Pathfinding for AI Agents with A-Star Search

## Concept Introduction **A\*** is a **best-first search algorithm** that finds the shortest path from a start point t...