Notes on Building Systems

Engineering journal by Muhammad Saifullah, writing on custom software, AI integration, and replacing manual business processes.

2026-07-03 - 5 min read

AI Engineering vs ML Engineering

The fastest-growing technical role of 2024 to 2025 was AI engineer, and it is not the same job as ML engineer.

2026-07-01 - 6 min read

MCP turns AI models from isolated tools into system participants, the difference between a smart assistant and an autonomous agent.

2026-06-30 - 6 min read

You cannot optimize what you cannot measure, and most AI projects do not define what good looks like before building.

2026-06-29 - 7 min read

A service returning 503 errors is better than a service returning wrong answers silently.

2026-06-27 - 4 min read

Most software projects fail not in development, but in the two weeks before anyone writes a line.

2026-06-27 - 7 min read

RAG systems fail not because they cannot retrieve, but because they retrieve the wrong thing with high confidence.

2026-06-26 - 4 min read

AI does not replace broken processes. It amplifies them.

2026-06-25 - 5 min read

Nearly 60 percent of workers could save 6+ hours per week if repetitive data tasks were automated.

2026-06-23 - 4 min read

The client did not ask for custom software. They saw the prototype and immediately understood the operational gap.

2026-06-22 - 7 min read

Most software failures happen not at launch, but 3 to 6 months later under real operating conditions.

2026-06-20 - 5 min read

$28,500 per employee per year is the true annual cost of manual data entry, according to a 2025 Parseur and QuestionPro survey.

2026-06-15 - 5 min read

$28,500 per operations employee per year was the cost of manual coordination, according to Parseur 2025.