Recent content on Kartik's blog
SDD and BMAD aren’t rival products — they’re two harnesses around the same probabilistic parrot: SDD writes intent as a living, verifiable contract, while BMAD routes work through personas and phases. But a persona is a costume, not a second mind, and no green checkmark moves the accountability off the human who merges the PR. My call for mid-2026: lean SDD, and treat BMAD as a…
Humans naturally tend to humanize things. We often assign intentions, personalities, emotions, intelligence, and moral responsibility to animals, machines, brands, the weather, our cars, our printers—and now, artificial intelligence.
BMAD brings software development discipline to AI agents through a structured, role-based workflow that replaces ad hoc prompting with specialized personas and artifact-driven planning.Its key innovations are agentic planning and context-engineered development, ensuring every development task has the right context while reducing drift, ambiguity, and context rot. In essence, BMAD is SDLC for…
The core thesis here is that the model stays probabilistic, so the surrounding system must be engineered. Harness engineering is the discipline of designing the environments, constraints, feedback loops, and infrastructure that make AI agents reliable at scale
As AI agents move from answering questions to taking actions, they become privileged components within modern systems—introducing new security challenges that cannot be ignored. This post explores why prompt injection is an unavoidable reality, how layered defenses can reduce risk, and why least privilege, validation, and observability form the foundation of secure agentic systems.
The Problem Statement: The Model Doesn’t Know What We Know. This is not a bug, but by design
An agent is not a new form of intelligence. It is a control structure, a deterministic shell wrapped around a probabilistic core.
The single most important mental model to understand LLMs is “A Stochastic Parrot ”. An LLM is a probabilistic next‑token prediction engine . It does not know, understand, reason, or think. It computes conditional probabilities over token sequences.
I just conquered a sugarcane-squeezer of a Salesforce migration—crushing a 5-month timeline down to less than 3 months! Along the way, I pushed the limits so hard that I literally burned through 1 external SSD and 2 NVMe external drives. 🚀🔥
Friday morning I wake up, not having to drive in to work to comply with a bloviated RTO mandate. The next 2 days are spent contemplating what I want to do next
and who I should reach out to for a job. None of my emotions’ list consist of stress, worry, or bitterness. What I feel is a sense of liberation, relief, and peace. 
 Three days after my position was eliminated resulting in me…
A simple application architecture goes a long way. The story here is of one such application which has been running unchanged for nearly 5 years, and has had zero outages.
Kubernetes - Greek for helmsman, is a technology that has taken the devops world by storm. Every company wants to use k8s (Kubernetes) as a silver bullet that’ll solve all their development ills. Join me on this journey as I provide you a mythical allegory, and then tell you what happened at one of my previous places. Everything in the second part happened as written; but names, places, and…
In the bleak early morning hour of 3:10 am on 30-June-2021, Joe Nash unleashed what would be the biggest faux-product to come out of AWS
The best laid plans of mice and men go awry. I meant to write one letter a month, but life gets in the way. In this letter, I delve into the intricacies of distributed systems, and deadlocks.
The 40th anniversary of “The story of Mel” just passed. It would be an outrage, if I let the captive audience off the hook. Who did click through, the title which could be a book.
My first foray, my first job, how I got my first job. First job was also where I learnt to be fearless, while overdoing it at times. Mainframes are very much like hobbits, old reliable, and surprise you unexpectedly. Mainframes’ technology has parallels to today, and this letter draws them out.
I talk about my internship the technical lessons I learnt. I had an adventure building my own interpreter, and writing own compiler. The heartbreak from a job application rejection is devastating, but also a moment for reflection.
The first in the series walks you through what the start of my journey in software engineering looked like. It starts with my undergrad years and goes through to my masters’ years. I talk about how we learnt programming with a dearth of resources, and how this paucity helped me learn tricks that I otherwise would not have.
Humankind’s achievements are attained standing on the shoulder of giants. What I have attained in my career is because of my mentors, peers, teachers, and adversaries; sometimes in spite of them.
NodeJS is a monstrosity , a Mordor of architectural pitfalls, the plastic of programming languages — ubiquitous, toxic, and sadly here to stay.
Like plastic, it started off as useful and has now become ubiquitous & toxic.
If I had a dollar for every time a sorting/b-tree/binary-search question is asked in a Software Engineering interview, I will retire and buy Michael Dell’s Kona property . Now that I’ve had this out of the way, let’s have conversation about Software Engineer interviews.
How do organizations reward people? Organizations disproportionately reward engineers who innovate. But behind the scenes are other engineers who hold up the fort, running the bread-and-butter of the company. It is the work of these engineers which not just goes unrecognized but also end up being sidelined because of the vapidity of their critical work