Software Architect · AI Engineer
Building software in the age of AI.
I’m Balaji Bankapur — a Senior Principal Software Engineer exploring how AI is reshaping the way we design, build, and maintain real systems. Practical write-ups from an engineer’s perspective.
20+ years in engineering•Operating systems → healthcare → AI
Latest writing
The Harness Around AI Is Half the Job
Provenance, guardrails, license checks. The tools already exist. The question is whether we run them on AI-generated code with the same rigor we run them on human-written code.
Agentic AI Isn't Replacement. It's a New Level of Intelligence.
The most useful framing for Agentic AI isn't "which jobs will it take?" It's "what can we build together that neither of us could produce alone?"
Token Economics: LLM Cost, Infrastructure Cost or Business Outcome Cost?
What actually makes up AI cost, and the concrete levers to reduce it without losing sight of the outcome.
Your Organization Has AI. So Why Isn't Productivity Improving?
The problem may not be the AI. It may be the way we work.
AI-First Software Engineering: Reimagining the SDLC
How Generative AI could transform software engineering — and why existing products make the problem much harder.