Why You.com’s CTO Thinks We’re Overbuilding AI Agents
You.com CTO Saahil Jain on why heavy agent orchestration is a 2024-era mistake, and why value is moving off the harness and onto tools and data.
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Past Episodes
The Man Who Wrote the Book on Micro-Frontends
Luca Mezzalira, who literally wrote the book on micro-frontends, explains everything you need to know
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Why AI Isn't Actually Making Eng Teams Faster
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How 30 Years of Tech Prepared This CTO For AI
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We solved GPU optimization. In this episode of 1 IDEA, Suresh Mathew sits down with Pooja Malik, Distinguished Engineer at Sedai, to talk through how Sedai's engineering team built GPU optimization from scratch, why the standard metrics fail, and what's still unsolved.
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John Wang (Co-Founder @ Assembled) did what most companies talk about but rarely pull off: he spun up a four-person AI team inside an existing company, ran it like a YC startup, and hit millions in ARR in 18 months. But the board was angry, the org nearly split, and the sales team couldn't sell the product.
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In this episode of 1 IDEA, Suresh Mathew sits down with Preeti Somal (SVP of Engineering @ Temporal) to unpack how her team prepared for a failure they knew was coming and how other engineering leaders can do the same.
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Vinay Perneti (VP of Eng at Augment) shares the Bottleneck Test: a framework for leaders to empower their teams when they become the blocker.
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Mohit Aron built 2 companies to $10B+ (Nutanix & Cohesity) by rejecting Silicon Valley's MVP obsession. He reveals why a "Minimum Lovable Product" beats an MVP every time.
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Rachit Lohani (fmr. CTO @ Paylocity) breaks down why AI productivity metrics fail — and the guardrails that make AI actually useful.
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Kevin Hill, VP of Engineering @ Salesforce, shares how backing his team’s “impossible” ideas led to the one idea that unlocked Salesforce’s UI overhaul.
How To Ship Features 83% Faster
What happens when AI starts modifying production code faster than your design process can keep up? In this episode of 1 IDEA, Suresh Mathew sits down with Manish Mukherjee (VP of Engineering @ Cisco) to unpack a real scaling problem his team ran into after introducing AI into an existing codebase. What we cover: - Why AI speed breaks traditional “design as you build” workflows - What the team had to do to rework their design process - How those changes reduced feature delivery time from ~12 days to ~2
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How To Prepare For The Next AWS Outage
In this episode of 1 IDEA, Suresh Mathew sits down with Preeti Somal (SVP of Engineering @ Temporal) to unpack how her team prepared for a failure they knew was coming and how other engineering leaders can do the same.
The Startup Within A Startup Playbook
John Wang (Co-Founder @ Assembled) did what most companies talk about but rarely pull off: he spun up a four-person AI team inside an existing company, ran it like a YC startup, and hit millions in ARR in 18 months. But the board was angry, the org nearly split, and the sales team couldn't sell the product.
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Recent resources
The ONLY Metric to Measure AIs' Impact On Engineering
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Why You.com’s CTO Thinks We’re Overbuilding AI Agents
You.com CTO Saahil Jain on why heavy agent orchestration is a 2024-era mistake, and why value is moving off the harness and onto tools and data.
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