Engineering Notes

Engineering Notes

Thoughts and Ideas on AI by Muthukrishnan
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...
07 Oct 2025

Measure What Matters Through Data-Informed Leadership

As an engineering manager, your ability to lead effectively at scale hinges on one crucial skill: **measuring what matt...
07 Oct 2025

Monte Carlo Tree Search from Games to LLMs

## Concept Introduction **Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)** is a heuristic search algorithm for finding optimal decisio...
06 Oct 2025

Programming Multi-Agent Conversations with AutoGen

## Concept Introduction **AutoGen** is a framework for simplifying the orchestration, optimization, and automation of ...
06 Oct 2025

Treat Tech Debt Like a Financial Portfolio

As an engineering manager, your role evolves from solving technical problems to building a system that solves problems....