Recent content on Akshay Katyal | MrDHat
Recently, in our team (& on the internet), compaction has been a hot topic. We have been trying to get people to compact more often because there is a belief that compactions are good, with the current state of models, and are absolutely needed for good outcomes. There’s obvious pushback around it “losing context” or “it being really slow”. I get the complaints and it…
We have more than 600 skills, spread across nearly 80 plugins. Anyone on the team can write one and publish it to a marketplace the rest of us install from. While reviewing the PRs that added these skills, our team kept leaving the same comments on skill after skill. The same feedback came up so often that it made sense to write it down once. So I built a skill that reviews skills, and we open…
A few weeks ago, I deleted 93 skills in a single pull request. If you haven’t worked with them, a skill is a small bundle of instructions you hand to the model, a workflow you’ve written down once so it runs the same way every time, the kind of thing you’d reach for when you’re chasing down a flaky test, or pulling together the context for an incident at 2 am.
Everyone (rightfully so!) wants high standards. We admire craftsmanship, discipline, and excellence. In fact, we encourage others to push harder and aim higher. In the early days of my first real startup, our code base was a mess, and every single pull request was a disaster. A total dumpster fire, honestly. We all wanted high standards, but we were absolutely drowning in not even having a floor.…
I’ve been exploring a hybrid approach to learning that combines the depth of traditional books with the breadth of AI-generated research. Traditional books give me the foundational knowledge and deep insights from experts, while LLM-generated research books allow me to explore specific topics with comprehensive, up-to-date information synthesized from multiple sources. I find that reading a…
I recently joined a new team & my onboarding task was to optimize storage in one of our Elasticsearch clusters which held 100s of terabytes of data. One of the first things we needed to figure out was whether the system could survive a massive deletion during peak traffic. We expected indexing to clog up and search latencies to spike. What actually happened was more interesting: the cluster…
In my last post, I described the transition from entrepreneurship to employment and how I felt during it. Today, I want to discuss how I view that transition from a practical point of view. As an ex-entrepreneur, I knew what my superpowers were. I had learned to empathize with customers naturally, read market trends & build a strong fundamentals-focused team. As I started looking for a role, I had…
I’m an engineer with a passion for building things and seeing how they grow. I’ve spent over 10 years in tech, with almost 7 of those as an entrepreneur. Engineering, to me, is more than just a job - it’s an art form, a way to solve problems and create something meaningful. After running startups, including one that got acquired, I’ve moved into product development roles at some exciting…
Around 3 years back, after spending seven years as an entrepreneur—I found myself at crossroads. Having built startups, one of which was acquired, I decided to step away from the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship to explore what being an employee is like. This transition wasn’t just about changing roles; it was about navigating a shift in mindset, skillset, and priorities. Why I Made the…