https://tanveerhari.com/writing/Essays by Tanveer Singh on software architecture, intelligent systems, and the craft.enhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/why-ai-should-grow-wiser.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/why-ai-should-grow-wiser.htmlLLMs lowered the walls between ideas and their making. The harder question is what all that capability is for.Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-story-behind-maiaen.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-story-behind-maiaen.htmlFifteen years of separate threads, a music composer, a language for testers, a year of philosophy, that turned out to be one idea.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/start-small-stay-narrow.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/start-small-stay-narrow.htmlOver the past three or four years, I have made a lot of mistakes. Basic mistakes. And the worst part is that I am still making them today. Simple rules to…Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/llms-a-discovery.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/llms-a-discovery.htmlNot good architecturally, but viable economically. On using LLMs while building towards systems that need them less.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-agent-memory-problem.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-agent-memory-problem.htmlThe first time I noticed it, I was watching our agent fail at a task it had succeeded at twenty minutes earlier. Same prompt, same environment, same…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/when-the-bottleneck-moves.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/when-the-bottleneck-moves.htmlI have spent enough time watching small teams outbuild large ones, in 2026, that I have stopped treating it as the exception. It is the new shape of the…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/explore-then-scale.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/explore-then-scale.htmlI have started to notice that "AI-native" has joined the small cemetery of phrases that mean less every time they are used. Cloud-native died there. So…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-story-behind-these-pages.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-story-behind-these-pages.htmlSome of the earliest memories I have are of maps. I would follow rivers with a finger until they ran out at a coastline, trace roads through villages…Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/from-engineer-to-architect.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/from-engineer-to-architect.htmlFor years, the primary obstacle to my ideas was resources. I had the design instinct. I had the taste. I didn't have the hands. Every project past a…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/habit-beats-goals.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/habit-beats-goals.htmlI use a pedometer app. It has a daily step goal. I rarely hit it. No calamity has ever followed from missing it. And yet the app has changed how much I…Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/muscom.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/muscom.htmlA final-year project that failed in almost every way, and the music composer it is still trying to become.Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/design-your-dsl-for-the-layperson.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/design-your-dsl-for-the-layperson.htmlThe natural instinct when designing a tool for a domain is to design it for domain experts. It feels respectful. It feels rigorous. It's almost always…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/domain-driven-design-for-creative-computing.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/domain-driven-design-for-creative-computing.htmlWhen I was sketching a DSL for a creative domain (in this case, a computational-composition project), I kept running into the same design decision. Where…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/formal-languages-are-the-bridge.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/formal-languages-are-the-bridge.htmlIn 2023 I wrote a note to myself that formal languages were the bridge between programming and intelligent systems. I was speculating. Three years on, the…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/mvp-paralysis.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/mvp-paralysis.htmlI once spent months trying to define an MVP for a product idea in the assistive-AI space. Every candidate MVP I sketched kept expanding. To work at all…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/deadlines-as-complexity-control.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/deadlines-as-complexity-control.htmlI once had a task I estimated at two weeks. Over a year later, it hadn't shipped. In the post-mortem, the two-week estimate turned out to be correct. What…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/start-with-objectives-not-with-grammars.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/start-with-objectives-not-with-grammars.htmlThe most common failure mode I see in technically capable builders (including in myself, regularly) is jumping to implementation detail before settling…Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/a-life-around-curiosity.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/a-life-around-curiosity.htmlMaps, made-up planets, crude poetry, then programming. The harder part was building a life around the curiosity.Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/inspiration-needs-attention.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/inspiration-needs-attention.htmlA specific failure mode I've watched unfold multiple times, more than once: a small team of talented engineers, each holding a demanding role elsewhere…Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-it-jobs-moderation-tax.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-it-jobs-moderation-tax.htmlFor a chunk of my early career, I worked as an engineer in the standard IT-corporate mode and told myself the money justified the misfit. It didn't, at…Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/intelligence-is-relative.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/intelligence-is-relative.htmlIntelligence is the ability to form, update and use concepts, and every one of those is bounded by the system doing it.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/worlds-models-and-minds.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/worlds-models-and-minds.htmlA system with a fixed model is a world. A system whose model evolves is a mind. The difference is where intelligence lives.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/software-that-thinks-with-you.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/software-that-thinks-with-you.htmlFrom commands to conversation: why development should be interactive, and what makes an application intelligent at all.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-indian-it-bubble-that-never-burst.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/the-indian-it-bubble-that-never-burst.htmlIs a typical IT services company in India a business built out of technology, or a business that merely uses technology? The two sound alike. They are not.Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/art-and-craft.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/art-and-craft.htmlArt asks you to forget the rules. Craft asks you to keep them. Most institutions teach only one.Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/a-workshop-for-stories.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/a-workshop-for-stories.htmlWhat a story is, why one thought can take many mediums, and why it needs a place to be made.Essayhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/iot-1-why-iot-is-hard-to-test.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/iot-1-why-iot-is-hard-to-test.htmlScale, variety and the internet itself make the usual QA process fall apart. What to do instead.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/iot-2-an-end-to-end-test-harness.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/iot-2-an-end-to-end-test-harness.htmlSimulated devices, a broker in the middle, and a framework that checks every hop: how to automate an IoT system’s tests.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/iot-3-edge-ai-attendance.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/iot-3-edge-ai-attendance.htmlAn attendance system that combines a sensor, a Raspberry Pi and face recognition, and what its architecture teaches.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-1-the-shape-of-the-problem.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-1-the-shape-of-the-problem.htmlWhat a Netconf manager has to do, written as one small equation, and why it splits into a library and a service.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-2-the-library.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-2-the-library.htmlFour layers in the RFC become four components: operations, session, RPC and transport, with the session at the centre.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-3-the-service.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-3-the-service.htmlGrowing the design one use case at a time: from one client and one node to many clients and many nodes.Architecturehttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-4-subscriptions.htmlhttps://tanveerhari.com/writing/netconf-4-subscriptions.htmlWhy a good architecture absorbs RFC 5277 with almost no change, and the one place it should bend.Architecture