About
About Sunil Mathew
Sunil Mathew teaches the design of agentic systems and advises engineering teams making those decisions. He brings engineering and leadership experience from Google, Amazon, Walmart and startups. His focus is the reasoning behind a system’s design and the evidence that helps a team make its next decision.
This page states what can be sourced. Where a fact is outstanding it is named rather than filled in.
Who this page is for
You are deciding whether this transfers
Two readers arrive here. One is weighing thirty live hours against everything else that could fill them. The other has a design decision in front of a team and is deciding whether an outside reviewer would help or merely add an opinion.
Both are asking the same question, and it is not about credentials. It is whether the way this person reasons about a system transfers to the system you are responsible for. That question is answerable, so the rest of this page answers it rather than listing achievements.
An illustrative example
How a design question gets answered
A returns assistant reads a policy, checks a request and recommends a refund. Someone asks whether it can issue the refund as well. On a diagram that is one more connection. In production the system can now move money.
The example is illustrative and no customer incident is claimed. What follows is the order the questions get asked in — the same order the programme and an advisory review both use.
- 01
Separate the recommendation from the action
Gathering policy evidence and preparing an answer is one responsibility. Moving money is another. They look like one box and they need different controls.
- 02
Ask what evidence permits the action
Not what the prompt says is permitted. What the tool itself will refuse to do when the evidence it was handed does not hold up.
- 03
Decide what happens when the answer is uncertain
A request outside the policy needs a clear next step. A tool that times out needs a way to examine the state of the action before repeating it.
- 04
Ask what you can see afterwards
Which evidence was used, what the tool did, whether the workflow stayed inside its boundaries. Without that, evaluation cannot tell you which decision to change.
Each of those four is worked through in full in the published guides, which is the most direct evidence available of how the reasoning actually runs.
What is verified
The claims on this site, and their source
Next step
Two ways to work together
Programmes
The open cohort for an individual, employer-funded places, and a group programme for a team. Build a working agentic system and practise explaining the decisions behind it.
Compare the routes GuidanceAdvisory
Framing a use case, reviewing an architecture and agreeing the next useful piece of work. Deliberately bounded, and not a delivery engagement.
What it coversA specific question that fits neither? Contact lists which route goes where.
Written . Pending Sunil’s factual approval.