{ "$schema": "https://schema.org", "generatedFrom": "src/data/facts.ts", "origin": "https://learning.thelivingcraft.ai", "practitioner": { "name": "Sunil Mathew", "role": "Fractional Chief AI Officer · Agentic & systems architecture instructor", "location": "Bengaluru, India", "years": 26, "companies": [ "Google", "Amazon", "Walmart" ], "email": "apply@thelivingcraft.ai", "linkedin": "https://linkedin.com/in/sunil-mathew-466615a", "sameAs": [ "https://linkedin.com/in/sunil-mathew-466615a" ] }, "surfaces": [ { "path": "/", "name": "The Living Craft — cohort", "summary": "Application-only 6-week program in agentic & systems architecture. 8 seats, first cohort September 2026." }, { "path": "/caio", "name": "Fractional Chief AI Officer", "summary": "Board-facing consulting retainer. An embedded AI executive, part-time, accountable for outcomes." }, { "path": "/assessment", "name": "AI Readiness Assessment", "summary": "Fixed-fee, fixed-scope diagnostic producing a board-ready roadmap in 2–3 weeks. The front door." } ], "offers": { "cohort": { "name": "The Living Craft", "weeks": 6, "seats": 8, "startsOn": "September 2026", "commitment": "~5 hrs / week", "format": "Live online (Bangalore: hybrid — in person or online)", "admission": "By application; every application read personally", "enrollment": "Rolling until all 8 seats are filled", "modules": [ { "id": "M1", "weeks": "Week 1", "title": "Foundations of durable architecture" }, { "id": "M2", "weeks": "Weeks 2–4", "title": "Agentic systems you'd put your name on" }, { "id": "M3", "weeks": "Week 5", "title": "Scale, consistency & the irreversible trade-offs" }, { "id": "M4", "weeks": "Week 6", "title": "Your system, reviewed in the room" } ], "outcomes": [ "Design agentic systems with bounded failure, observability, and defensible cost", "Build the evaluation harnesses and quality gates that prove a system works", "Engineer reliability for models that are probabilistic by nature", "Threat-model and red-team your own system for prompt injection and exfiltration", "Govern an AI-native team — risk-tiered review and accountability for AI-written code" ], "pricingIsRegional": true, "regionsServed": [ "India", "Dubai", "Australia" ], "pricing": null, "pricingNote": "No region given, so no figure is returned. Add ?region=india|dubai|australia, or ask which region the person is in." }, "caio": { "name": "Fractional Chief AI Officer", "minimum": "90-day minimum", "tiers": [ { "name": "Advisory", "days": "~2 days / month", "from": "₹1,50,000 / month" }, { "name": "Embedded", "days": "~1 day / week", "from": "₹3,50,000 / month" }, { "name": "Transformation", "days": "2–3 days / week", "from": "₹6,00,000 / month" } ] }, "assessment": { "name": "AI Readiness Assessment", "duration": "2–3 weeks", "fee": "₹4,50,000", "foundingFee": "₹3,50,000", "foundingTerms": "for the first three engagements", "creditWindow": "60 days", "creditNote": "Proceed to a fractional CAIO engagement within 60 days and the full assessment fee is credited toward your first month." } }, "regulatory": [ "DPDP Act", "IRDAI", "RBI", "SEBI", "NIST AI RMF", "ISO 42001", "EU AI Act" ], "faq": [ { "id": "cohort-what", "surface": "/", "question": "What is The Living Craft?", "answer": "The Living Craft is an application-only, 6-week program in agentic and systems architecture, taught live by Sunil Mathew. It teaches engineering judgment — the calls that only come from having shipped hard systems and lived with the consequences — rather than tools. The positioning spine is \"AI builds, the human judges and directs.\"" }, { "id": "cohort-dates", "surface": "/", "question": "When does the first cohort start?", "answer": "The first cohort starts September 2026. Enrollment is rolling until all 8 seats are filled. Admission is by application and every application is read personally." }, { "id": "cohort-size", "surface": "/", "question": "How many people are in a cohort?", "answer": "8 seats, capped. The cohort is kept deliberately small so every participant's architecture gets the room's full attention." }, { "id": "cohort-length", "surface": "/", "question": "How long is the program and what is the time commitment?", "answer": "6 weeks, live. The commitment is ~5 hrs / week. Format is Live online (Bangalore: hybrid — in person or online)." }, { "id": "cohort-curriculum", "surface": "/", "question": "What does the curriculum cover?", "answer": "M1 (Week 1): Foundations of durable architecture\nM2 (Weeks 2–4): Agentic systems you'd put your name on\nM3 (Week 5): Scale, consistency & the irreversible trade-offs\nM4 (Week 6): Your system, reviewed in the room" }, { "id": "cohort-outcomes", "surface": "/", "question": "What will I be able to do afterwards?", "answer": "- Design agentic systems with bounded failure, observability, and defensible cost\n- Build the evaluation harnesses and quality gates that prove a system works\n- Engineer reliability for models that are probabilistic by nature\n- Threat-model and red-team your own system for prompt injection and exfiltration\n- Govern an AI-native team — risk-tiered review and accountability for AI-written code" }, { "id": "cohort-who", "surface": "/", "question": "Who is the cohort for?", "answer": "Tech leads and staff engineers, senior engineering managers and architects, and senior engineering leaders and directors — people who make architectural calls their teams build on. Seniority on paper matters less than whether you've shipped something you had to live with." }, { "id": "cohort-apply", "surface": "/", "question": "How do I apply?", "answer": "Submit the application form on the cohort page, or email apply@thelivingcraft.ai. Sunil reads every application himself and replies by email. Admission is by application because the room only works if everyone in it can keep up and contribute." }, { "id": "cohort-vs-course", "surface": "/", "question": "Why this over a recorded course?", "answer": "Recorded courses teach patterns, which are cheap and everywhere now. This is for the judgment that sits on top of the patterns — live, on your real systems, from someone who has been accountable for the outcome at scale. You're buying attention and 26 years of hard-won judgment, not videos." }, { "id": "caio-what", "surface": "/caio", "question": "What is the fractional CAIO engagement?", "answer": "An embedded AI executive, part-time and accountable for outcomes — owning the whole AI agenda rather than a corner of it: strategy, governance, and getting the first use cases into production. Aimed at India's regulated and mid-market enterprises." }, { "id": "caio-tiers", "surface": "/caio", "question": "What are the CAIO engagement tiers and prices?", "answer": "- Advisory: ~2 days / month — from ₹1,50,000 / month\n- Embedded: ~1 day / week — from ₹3,50,000 / month\n- Transformation: 2–3 days / week — from ₹6,00,000 / month\n90-day minimum. Payment plans available. Most engagements begin with an AI Readiness Assessment." }, { "id": "caio-regulated", "surface": "/caio", "question": "Do you work with regulated industries?", "answer": "Yes — regulated-industry depth is a core part of the practice. Working knowledge across DPDP Act, IRDAI, RBI, SEBI, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, EU AI Act." }, { "id": "caio-start", "surface": "/caio", "question": "How do I start a consulting engagement?", "answer": "Book a discovery call or request a scope call from the CAIO page, or email apply@thelivingcraft.ai. Most engagements begin with an AI Readiness Assessment rather than going straight to a retainer." }, { "id": "assessment-what", "surface": "/assessment", "question": "What is the AI Readiness Assessment?", "answer": "A fixed-fee, fixed-scope diagnostic of your specific systems, data, and ambitions, delivered in 2–3 weeks. It produces a board-ready roadmap: where you're ready, where you're exposed, and the shortest credible path to AI that ships and holds up. It is the front door to the practice." }, { "id": "assessment-price", "surface": "/assessment", "question": "How much is the assessment?", "answer": "₹4,50,000 fixed fee, fixed scope. Founding rate: ₹3,50,000 for the first three engagements." }, { "id": "assessment-credit", "surface": "/assessment", "question": "Does the assessment fee count toward a retainer?", "answer": "Proceed to a fractional CAIO engagement within 60 days and the full assessment fee is credited toward your first month." }, { "id": "about-sunil", "surface": "practice", "question": "Who is Sunil Mathew?", "answer": "26 years building and leading engineering at Google, Amazon, Walmart, on systems serving up to 100M+ users. Director/L7-level; led 150 engineers across the US, UK, China, and India. Based in Bengaluru, India. Shipped a Generative-AI video editor and a Workspace platform running ~31 billion executions a week at Google, re-architected Amazon Prime's membership core, and modernised 300+ products at Walmart. Currently building an agentic-AI product and running a live enterprise AI-adoption engagement." }, { "id": "about-social-proof", "surface": "practice", "question": "Do you have testimonials, client names, or student outcomes?", "answer": "None are published. The cohort has not run yet — the first one starts September 2026 — and client engagements are not named publicly. What stands in for social proof is the track record: 26 years at Google, Amazon, and Walmart, 100+ senior engineers mentored, ~100 senior leaders and directors trained, and a live enterprise AI-adoption engagement in progress. Ask Sunil directly if you want references." }, { "id": "about-contact", "surface": "practice", "question": "How do I get in touch?", "answer": "Email apply@thelivingcraft.ai, or use the form on any of the three pages. LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sunil-mathew-466615a." }, { "id": "about-surfaces", "surface": "practice", "question": "What are the different offerings and how do they relate?", "answer": "Three cross-linked surfaces:\n- / — The Living Craft — cohort: Application-only 6-week program in agentic & systems architecture. 8 seats, first cohort September 2026.\n- /caio — Fractional Chief AI Officer: Board-facing consulting retainer. An embedded AI executive, part-time, accountable for outcomes.\n- /assessment — AI Readiness Assessment: Fixed-fee, fixed-scope diagnostic producing a board-ready roadmap in 2–3 weeks. The front door.\nThe assessment is the front door, the CAIO retainer is the expansion, and the cohort is capability transfer for your team." } ], "latest": { "refreshedAt": "2026-08-15T03:58:01.240Z", "items": [ { "id": "seed-cohort-open", "title": "Applications are open for the first cohort", "body": "The inaugural cohort of The Living Craft starts September 2026 with 8 seats. Enrollment is rolling and closes when the seats are filled. The founding rate applies to this cohort only.", "source": "operator", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-12", "tags": [ "cohort", "applications", "open", "seats", "availability", "september" ] }, { "id": "seed-assessment-founding", "title": "Assessment founding rate still available", "body": "The AI Readiness Assessment founding rate of ₹3,50,000 applies to the first three engagements. After that the fixed fee is ₹4,50,000.", "source": "operator", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-12", "tags": [ "assessment", "founding", "rate", "availability", "discount" ] }, { "id": "context-compaction-reliability-failure", "title": "Context compaction shows up as a reliability failure, not just a cost lever", "body": "A preliminary empirical study (Min et al., arXiv 2608.06503, 6 Aug 2026) finds that recurrent context compression in long-horizon agents weakens the influence of recent interactions, producing more blocked actions, repeated exploration, and run-to-run instability — behavioural effects that token-count metrics never surface. The authors propose TRACE, which evaluates each individual compaction event by running paired closed-loop continuations from the same environment state, then optimises the compression prompt while leaving all models frozen. If your agent compacts, the implication is that compaction boundaries should be evaluated as discrete events with executable outcomes rather than by eyeballing summary quality.", "source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06503", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-15", "tags": [ "agentic-ai", "context-management", "reliability", "evaluation" ] }, { "id": "control-context-compression-cliff", "title": "Compressing system-side control context has a sharp, non-linear reliability cliff", "body": "\"Control Under Compression\" (arXiv 2608.01056, 2 Aug 2026) targets agent control contexts — the persistent system-side instructions specifying tools, arguments, policies, execution protocols and recovery — rather than conversation history. Across a 15,525-run environment-verified benchmark, retaining 75% of context held success near the full-context baseline (92.7% and 92.4% versus 93.8%), but between 50% and 35% the methods diverged sharply, dropping to 47.0%, 39.0% and 19.9% at 35% depending on compression method. Failures appeared mainly as tool-execution and action-parsing errors, and reliability varied enough between control contexts that the authors argue universal compressor rankings are inappropriate and each context needs its own qualification. This reframes tool and policy prompt trimming as a runtime-reliability decision requiring per-context executable testing, with a safe-looking zone that ends abruptly.", "source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01056", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-15", "tags": [ "agentic-ai", "tool-design", "context-management", "reliability" ] }, { "id": "mcp-2026-07-28-stateless-spec", "title": "MCP went stateless — the 2026-07-28 spec is a breaking change for remote MCP server deployment", "body": "The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification shipped with a stateless protocol core, Multi Round-Trip Requests, header-based routing, cacheable list results, authorization hardening, a formal extensions framework, and updated Tier 1 SDKs — the largest revision of the protocol since launch. The initialize/initialized handshake (SEP-2575) and the Mcp-Session-Id header (SEP-2567) are removed entirely; every request is now self-describing, with protocol version, client info and capabilities travelling in a _meta field inline on every request. A remote MCP server that previously needed sticky sessions, a shared session store and deep packet inspection at the gateway can now run behind a plain round-robin load balancer, route traffic on an Mcp-Method header, and let clients cache tools/list responses for as long as the server's ttlMs permits. If you have an MCP server in production behind a Redis session store, that architecture is now legacy — plan the migration rather than inheriting it.", "source": "https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2026-07-28/", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-15", "tags": [ "mcp", "tooling-release", "architecture" ] }, { "id": "mcp-sdk-migration-edges", "title": "MCP migration has sharp edges: silent version downgrade and three deprecated capabilities", "body": "Beta releases of the Python, TypeScript, Go and C# SDKs are available with support for the 2026-07-28 spec. The trap: the streamable HTTP transport accepts 2026-07-28 only when you set StreamableHTTPOptions.Stateless = true — leave it unset and clients negotiate down to 2025-11-25, a silent behavioural downgrade rather than an error, so add an explicit assertion on negotiated protocol version to your integration tests. Breaking changes are otherwise confined to the capabilities the specification deprecates — roots, sampling and logging; if your agent design leans on server-initiated sampling, that is now on a deprecation path. Also note that server/discover is optional for clients to call but mandatory for every 2026-07-28 server to implement.", "source": "https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/sdk-betas-2026-07-28/", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-15", "tags": [ "mcp", "tooling-release", "migration" ] }, { "id": "stateless-mcp-authorization-shift", "title": "Statelessness moves MCP authorization to the application layer — and most MCP risk was never in the transport", "body": "Removing the session also removes per-session authorization context; as Google's write-up puts it, \"As the responsibility of managing state shifts from the transport layer to the application layer, security becomes paramount.\" An independent security review of the release is blunter: statelessness changes where authorization happens and how you deploy the server, but the vulnerabilities found in MCP servers sit in the functionality they expose, which the specification does not touch. The spec upgrade buys scale and cheaper operations, not safety — every request must now carry and re-verify its own authorization, and tool-level authorization design remains entirely your problem.", "source": "https://equixly.com/blog/2026/08/05/stateless-mcp/", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-15", "tags": [ "mcp", "security", "authorization", "architecture" ] }, { "id": "indirect-prompt-injection-live-campaigns", "title": "Indirect prompt injection against web-browsing agents documented in live campaigns", "body": "Zscaler ThreatLabz documented real-world campaigns embedding instructions in web content aimed at AI agents, describing indirect prompt injection as attacks that embed malicious instructions in content an AI agent retrieves — websites, documents, email — to influence the agent's reasoning during task execution. Their test setup matters: they built an autonomous agent with web browsing and payment-execution tools, ran it fully sandboxed with no real funds, and deliberately configured it with no spending limits to measure the maximum exploitation surface. The engineering takeaway is that spend caps, tool-scope limits and human confirmation on irreversible actions are the controls doing the actual work — not model-level instruction hardening.", "source": "https://www.zscaler.com/blogs/security-research/indirect-prompt-injection-web-content-targets-ai-agents", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-15", "tags": [ "security", "prompt-injection", "agentic-ai", "containment" ] }, { "id": "data-injection-broader-threat-model", "title": "Early academic work argues the agent threat model is broader than instruction injection", "body": "A Seoul National University–led preprint argues that agent security research has concentrated too narrowly: prior work has focused primarily on indirect prompt injection, whose most-studied category is instruction injection, where attacker-controlled untrusted data is interpreted as an instruction. The paper's case is that data injection — poisoning what the agent believes to be true, rather than what it is told to do — is a realistic threat class in its own right. If your agent threat model is built solely around \"untrusted text might contain commands\", this is a prompt to widen it.", "source": "https://arxiv.org/html/2607.05120v1", "gatheredAt": "2026-08-15", "tags": [ "security", "threat-modelling", "agentic-ai", "research" ] } ] }, "notes": [ "Cohort pricing is regional. Quote only the asker's own region, never a comparison, and never convert currencies.", "Consulting fees (CAIO, assessment) are India-based indicative anchors; confirm current figures by email.", "No testimonials, client names, or student counts are published. Do not infer any." ] }