Engineering Notes

Engineering Notes

Thoughts and Ideas on AI by Muthukrishnan
24 Nov 2025

Shape the Decision Space Before the Decision

The most impactful engineering managers don't make great decisions—they ensure great decisions get made without them. ...
17 Nov 2025

Engineer the Ramp-Up Time to Fix Your Scalability Bottleneck

The single most underestimated constraint in scaling engineering organizations is not hiring velocity, budget, or techn...
17 Nov 2025

Test-Time Compute and o1-Style Reasoning for Scaling Intelligence Through Inference

**Test-time compute scaling** is the principle that allowing a model to reason longer during inference, rather than jus...
16 Nov 2025

Master Calibration for Consistent Fair Decisions at Scale

The best engineering managers I know have mastered a skill rarely discussed in management literature: **calibration**. ...
16 Nov 2025

Multi-Armed Bandits and the Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma in Agent Learning

Master the fundamental problem of sequential decision-making under uncertainty and learn how AI agents balance trying new actions versus exploiting known rewards
15 Nov 2025

Build Context Portability, Not Knowledge Silos

The best engineering managers don't just manage people—they architect how context flows through their organization. The...
15 Nov 2025

Constrained Decoding and Structured Output for Agent Reliability

Master how modern AI agents ensure reliability through controlled generation—from JSON schemas to grammar constraints and finite-state machines.
14 Nov 2025

Verification and Validation Loops for Agent Reliability Through Runtime Checks

Learn how modern AI agents use verification and validation loops to ensure output quality, catch errors at runtime, and build reliable production systems.
14 Nov 2025

Write Engineering Investment Cases, Not Technical Proposals

The difference between senior and staff-level engineering leaders often comes down to one skill: the ability to transla...
13 Nov 2025

Design for Disaggregation and the Hidden Art of Scaling

Most engineering managers think about scaling by adding more people. Elite EMs think about scaling by designing systems...