Engineering Notes

Engineering Notes

Thoughts and Ideas on AI by Muthukrishnan
04 Dec 2025

Architect for Reversibility as a High-Velocity Advantage

The most expensive decisions in engineering aren't the wrong ones—they're the ones that take too long to make. Every da...
04 Dec 2025

Improving Decisions Through Multi-Agent Debate and Deliberation

How AI agents can reach better decisions by arguing with each other—exploring debate protocols, deliberation architectures, and the surprising power of constructive disagreement.
03 Dec 2025

Diffusion Models and Iterative Refinement in AI Agent Planning

Explore how diffusion models enable AI agents to generate and refine complex action plans through iterative denoising, revolutionizing long-horizon planning and decision-making.
03 Dec 2025

Expand Your Decision-Making Bandwidth, Not Your Meeting Calendar

The most dangerous bottleneck in a scaling engineering organization isn't compute, infrastructure, or even talent—it's ...
02 Dec 2025

Beam Search and Parallel Decoding for Multiple Solution Paths in AI Agents

Master beam search—a powerful technique for exploring multiple solution paths simultaneously in AI agents, from classical NLP to modern LLM reasoning systems.
02 Dec 2025

Manage Technical Investment Velocity, Not Just Delivery Velocity

Most engineering managers obsess over delivery velocity—story points completed, features shipped, sprint goals met. But...
01 Dec 2025

Design Self-Correcting Systems, Not Processes

The best engineering managers don't build processes—they design systems that correct themselves. The difference is prof...
01 Dec 2025

Reward Shaping and Credit Assignment for Guiding Agent Learning

Master the art and science of designing reward functions and solving the credit assignment problem—the key to training agents that learn efficiently and align with human intentions.
30 Nov 2025

Design Your Dependency Architecture for Organizational Velocity

Most engineering managers obsess over code architecture while ignoring the dependency architecture that determines actu...
30 Nov 2025

Tool Composition and Chaining for Complex Agent Capabilities

Master the art of combining simple tools into sophisticated agent capabilities through composition patterns, chaining strategies, and intelligent orchestration.