# Anuj Mulik

> Notes on writing code with AI, at scale.

Anuj Mulik is a software engineer at Featured.com. Insights from working with AI to write code at scale. From Navi Mumbai, India; living in Chandler, Arizona.

The posts here are written with AI, from my own notes, numbers and pull requests. The work, and the mistakes, are mine.

## Writing

- [138 database queries to show a home page](https://anujmulik.com/writing/138-queries-to-show-a-home-page.md) — Closing the loop on latency in a chat product. The harness, the eight causes, what each fix measured, and why counts beat milliseconds when the agent is doing the work. (October 8, 2026)
- [Stop growing the system prompt. Coach the agent instead.](https://anujmulik.com/writing/a-coach-for-the-agent.md) — We moved behaviour rules out of the system prompt and into one-line, per-turn nudges picked by a cheap judge. Here is what we measured. (October 8, 2026)
- [A golden set is not an eval suite](https://anujmulik.com/writing/a-golden-set-is-not-an-eval-suite.md) — How we keep one small labelled set per decision, score it for cents before a merge, and why the set you tuned on is not the number you report. The setup, the traps, and what the live eval suite taught us instead. (October 8, 2026)
- [Delete the comments. The agent believes them.](https://anujmulik.com/writing/delete-the-comments.md) — Code comments were a courtesy to the next human. Coding agents read them as fact, write them as narration, and both go wrong. How we got to a zero-comment budget on new code, and what we do with the context instead. (October 8, 2026)
- [Does being blunt with the agent work? I asked it.](https://anujmulik.com/writing/does-being-blunt-with-the-agent-work.md) — Five weeks, 218 of my own messages to a coding agent, classified by tone. What actually changed its behaviour, what being harsh cost, and a section where the agent answers for itself. (October 8, 2026)
- [Stop asking a language model yes-or-no questions](https://anujmulik.com/writing/stop-asking-a-language-model-yes-or-no-questions.md) — A typed decision model, Jev, answers labels, scores and booleans with a probability for a fraction of a cent. How it unlocked flows we could not afford before, where it does not fit, and the method we use to find the next gain. (October 8, 2026)
- [The agent kept a diary. Nobody read it.](https://anujmulik.com/writing/the-agent-kept-a-diary.md) — We tried to make a product observe itself from inside its own code. It cost tokens on every turn and changed nothing. A scheduled agent that runs once a week, outside the product, did what the observer could not. (October 8, 2026)
- [I wrote the rules down. The agent broke them anyway.](https://anujmulik.com/writing/guardrails-1-rules-nobody-reads.md) — The first guardrails I put around coding agents were documents. Here is how they failed, what the failures cost, and the shape of the checks that replaced them. (October 8, 2026; Guardrails for coding agents, part 1)
- [When the agent is the maintainer](https://anujmulik.com/writing/guardrails-2-a-repo-whose-maintainer-is-an-agent.md) — Starting a codebase where agents are the primary maintainers from day one. Gate classes, budgets for prompt text, and a rule for when a check is allowed to block. (October 8, 2026; Guardrails for coding agents, part 2)
- [Your test suite is slowing the agent down](https://anujmulik.com/writing/guardrails-3-verify-after-the-push.md) — Moving tests, type checks and evals out of the agent's way, the throughput it bought, and the limits of parallel agents on one machine. (October 8, 2026; Guardrails for coding agents, part 3)
- [The agent made seven decisions without me. I reverted all of them.](https://anujmulik.com/writing/guardrails-4-decisions-need-a-signature.md) — A week of regressions from choices the agent made on its own, and the rules on the human side of the loop that came out of it. (October 8, 2026; Guardrails for coding agents, part 4)
- [I wrote the rule three times. A hook finally held.](https://anujmulik.com/writing/guardrails-5-when-prose-fails-write-a-hook.md) — Some rules protect things that cannot be undone. Those rules do not belong in prose. They belong in a check the agent cannot talk its way past. (October 8, 2026; Guardrails for coding agents, part 5)

## Pages

- [About](https://anujmulik.com/about.md)
- [Contact](https://anujmulik.com/contact.md)
- [Privacy](https://anujmulik.com/privacy.md)
- [Developer docs](https://anujmulik.com/developers.md)

For agents: [llms.txt](https://anujmulik.com/llms.txt) · [OpenAPI](https://anujmulik.com/openapi.json) · MCP at https://anujmulik.com/api/mcp