Srinath Therampattil

Staff Engineer · Airbnb

Agentic AI on the systems businesses run on.

I'm a staff engineer with fifteen years on enterprise platforms. These days I build agentic AI on top of the systems businesses run on, and I write about what it takes to make it reliable — the guardrails, the human-in-the-loop, and the engineering around the model.

RoleStaff Engineer, Airbnb
FocusReliable agentic AI
Writing onPlatforms · AI · Reliability

Featured — selected writing

02 pieces

Latest — most recent

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01

Harness Engineering: The Layer That Actually Decides Whether Your Agent Works

Same model, wildly different reliability, depending on what's built around it. What harness engineering actually means, the layers a production harness needs, and an implementation-level look at the three real ways to build one — Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, and rolling your own with LangGraph or a raw tool loop.

agentic-aiarchitectureengineering
02

Loops, Not Prompts: How Codex and Claude Code Finish Real Work Unattended

A prompt gets you one round trip: ask, answer, done. A loop keeps going until a real stopping condition fires. How Codex CLI's /goal and Claude Code's /loop actually work, and the contract that makes it safe to walk away from either one.

agentic-aiautomationengineering
03

Why a 95% Reliable Step Does Not Make a 95% Reliable Agent

Every step in your agent workflow tests fine in isolation, and the whole thing still fails more than you'd expect. The reason is multiplicative, not mysterious — and once you see the math, it changes how you design the workflow.

agentic-aireliabilityarchitecture
04

Your Agents Open PRs Faster Than You Can Review Them

When a few agents are opening pull requests all day, review becomes the bottleneck. The strategies teams ahead of this are using — automate the mechanical, AI first-pass review, stacked PRs, humans on intent, verification upstream — how well they work, and how to set them up.

code-reviewai-agentsengineering
05

I Write Far Less Code Than I Used To. The Job Got Harder.

The metaphor went from autocomplete to agent, and the engineer's job went with it — from writing code to directing and checking the things that write it. What actually changed, why the productivity isn't automatic, and the skill that matters now.

ai-nativeagentic-aisoftware-engineering