Engineering Notes

Engineering Notes

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

Architecting Short-Term and Long-Term Memory in AI Agents

## Concept Introduction AI agents require structured memory to operate effectively across turns and sessions. Without ...
05 Oct 2025

Decentralize Decisions, Centralize Context

As an engineering manager, one of the most significant shifts you can make to level up is to stop being the primary dec...
05 Oct 2025

Ensuring Agent Safety with Constitutional AI Guardrails

## Concept Introduction **Constitutional AI (CAI)** is a method for training an AI to supervise itself. Rather than re...
05 Oct 2025

How AI Agents Use Tools with Function Calling

## Concept Introduction **Tool Use** is the mechanism that allows a language model to interact with and affect the out...
04 Oct 2025

Manage Energy Not Time for Sustainable High Performance

As an engineering manager, you've mastered the basics: 1-on-1s, feedback, and project tracking. But to reach the next l...
03 Oct 2025

Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Giving LLMs a Thinking Process

### Concept Introduction **Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Reasoning** is a prompting strategy that encourages a model to decom...
03 Oct 2025

Pave the Road to Scalable Speed in Your Engineering Org

As an engineering manager, you're constantly balancing the pressure to deliver new features with the need to maintain a...
02 Oct 2025

Shape the Environment Instead of Just Managing the Plants

As an engineering manager, it's easy to get trapped in the cycle of managing people and tasks—the individual "plants" i...
01 Oct 2025

Your Engineering Org is Your Product

As an engineering manager, it's easy to get trapped in the cycle of shipping features. Your team delivers, the business...