Edition 29: Vilva Athiban on agentic systems at Omio, why your AI agents don't need their own tools, my new favorite management book

Agentic systems at scale with Vilva Athiban

New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Vilva Athiban is Lead AI Engineer at Omio, where he single-handedly built the MCP-first backend behind Omio.ai.

We get into how MCP holds up once you're running it in production, how he orchestrates agents at Omio, and the tricks that keep LLM costs from spiraling.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

Listen on Spotify

Community reads

AI and agents

Agentic coding is straining CI. Here's how we scaled test impact analysis at Anthropic by Sachin Malhotra — CI job volume grew 25x in six months, and here is how they scaled this at Anthropic.

What Is an Agent Harness? Harness Engineering Explained by Tejas Kumar — he once told GPT-3.5 to upvote the top story on Hacker News, and it went about as well as you'd expect.

Don't build tools for AI agents by Sean Goedecke — his own agents already use Datadog more than he does, so why build them separate tools at all?

Engineering leadership

Nobody needs a human router by James Stanier — if AI can move information between teams for you, what's left for an engineering manager to do?

Engineering Strategy Is Not a Backlog by Stefan Haas — teching us what a Strategy really is.

We are all Product Engineers now by Laurie Voss — the future of engineering jobs in her words.

Industry

Inside OpenAI's agentic software factory by Gergely Orosz — inside the frontier lab where everyone, even finance and marketing, works with an unlimited token budget.

AI is breaking our proxies for expertise by Sean Goedecke — nearly five thousand mathematicians, twenty-five of them Fields medalists, are now rethinking what math expertise even means.

Design

The Most Important Design Work Happening Right Now Has No Designers in It by MC Dean — the decisions shaping how AI behaves get made before a user ever sees an interface, and no designer is in the room.

Book recommendation

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo

Zhuo started managing teams at Facebook at 25 and rose to VP of Product Design, running everything from teams of a few people to entire orgs. The book is the guide she wished she'd had on day one, built around the messy, unglamorous moments no one warns new managers about.

Find it on Goodreads

Meme of the week

> where Partial lets you pick only the keys you wanted and Maybe allows properties to be null. Even the TypeScript compiler was like, 'Just write JS, mate!'"">

Conferences

CityJS Athens

CityJS lands in Athens this October.

My link takes 10% off the ticket price for you.

More info and tickets

React Day Berlin

React Day Berlin takes over Kosmos on December 4.

Register through my badge and the remote ticket is free, which normally costs €90 at the early bird rate. You get the HD stream and the free remote workshops, and the recordings afterwards.

Register with my badge and watch for free

That's it for this one.

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