Engineering leadership and personal writing
Sid Savara
I lead software teams and write about systems, decisions, AI, and small personal observations about life.
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Latest Essays
New writing on engineering leadership.
The Project I Would Never Have Started Alone
AI Tooling lowers the cost of experimentation, encouraging big swings on speculative projects. With agents handling the busywork, it's easy to try something that…
Let The Agent Decide When It Needs A Ferrari
I want to give an AI agent the outcome, constraints, and budget - then let it decide which model should do the work.
When The Passenger Thinks They’re In Charge
I thought auntie was a passenger with too much influence. Then my mom told me whose car we were actually in.
Have Your Agent Call My Agent
I packaged my AI workflow for a friend. He handed it to his agent and sent back something better.
AI Agents and the Work You Shouldn’t Be Doing
AI agents can absorb work you can do, but should not spend your best attention doing.
The Code Review Bottleneck In The AI Era
AI can generate code faster than teams can review, understand, and own it. The best workflows move more thinking into the plan before the…
Sid Savara is an engineering leader with experience across Mercury, Shopify, Walmart Global Tech, and other organizations. He writes about leadership, decision-making, AI and agentic workflows, systems and little observations about life.
His own path includes growing from a software engineer to tech lead to engineering leader, including scaling teams from nothing to dozens of people, leveling up existing teams and leading teams at Shopify and Mercury as they navigated the transition to machine learning and AI-forward products.