I start with the use case, not the model.

Jaswanth Tikkireddy, AI engineer in India, building agentic AI systems end to end.

I build production AI systems end to end: LLM applications, agents, retrieval, backends and the infrastructure around them. I studied CSE (AI & ML) at VIT-AP, graduated in 2025, and have been shipping at Bettrlabs since October 2025.

See the projects

I work backwards from the use case. I map the workflow, design the architecture and decide how data moves through the system, and only then decide where a model fits. Most of what I have built began as a systems-design problem; the prompt came last.

At Bettrlabs that has meant a legal and regulatory RAG, a compliance system for FMCG products, hybrid search over formulations, Razorpay payment infrastructure and a large part of the platform backend. Retrieval is one tool I use, alongside agents, tool orchestration, state and plain backend engineering.

Legal and Regulatory RAG

I take full responsibility for the systems I deliver: the architecture, the system logic and the debugging decisions, and I make sure I can explain every part of what goes to production. When something breaks I work from logs and traces of what the system actually did, and I watch tokens, latency and cost as closely as correctness. Outside work I build Jarvis, a personal assistant on an agent harness I wrote, to learn each layer of an agent by hand.

Jarvis

How I build

The steps I take, in the order I take them.

  1. Understand the use case

    Who relies on it, how the workflow runs, and what a wrong answer costs.

  2. Design the architecture

    Only the components the problem requires, and clear boundaries between them.

  3. Define the data flow

    What enters, what leaves, and exactly where the model sits in between.

  4. Implement

    Clean API boundaries and only the abstractions the product needs.

  5. Test failure cases

    Duplicates, delays, missing data and worst-case scenarios, before the happy path.

  6. Inspect logs

    Structured logs and traces, so failures are diagnosed rather than guessed.

  7. Optimise

    Accuracy, reliability, tokens, latency, then cost.

Principles

For AI systems, in this order

  1. accuracy
  2. context quality
  3. reliability
  4. token usage
  5. latency
  6. cost

Toolkit

AI engineering, 09 skills

Retrieval and data, 08 skills

Backend and platform, 09 skills