I am Srikanth Sastry. I am currently an engineering lead at Meta working on privacy infrastructure. Before Meta, I was a software engineer at Google in Cambridge, MA, and before that a postdoctoral associate with Nancy Lynch at CSAIL, MIT. Prior to that, I received my PhD from Texas A&M University.
My professional interests include distributed system design, software engineering processes, and building engineering teams. I also maintain a digital garden — a collection of evolving ideas and notes that complement my blog posts.
In a previous life, during my years in academia, I worked on distributed systems, networking, fault tolerance, and algorithm design and analysis. My list of publications are available on DBLP.
Recent Writing
All 63 posts →
AI vs. Open Source, Part 2: The Hollow Commons
Even if open source finds new legal foundations, the communities that would build and maintain them are under assault. AI breaks the iterated game that sustains contributor communities, and the commons is hollowing out from within.
AI vs. Open Source, Part 1: The Empty Grant
SECURE Data Act: The dilution in pseudonymization
Subsidiarity is not Hayek
Deliverance from Directive Governance
The Suggestible Actor: A New Model for AI-Assisted Software Development
Tech Companies and Directive Governance: A Situationship
From the Garden
All 84 notes →AI Collapses the Economic Moat of Clean-Room Reimplementation
🌳The copyleft moat was never purely legal. It was economic: compliance was cheaper than reimplementation. AI collapsed that cost.
Align Alerts to SEV Criteria
🌳Alerts should fire at or near the threshold where an SLO breach would occur, not well before.
Backward Compatibility for Leaky Abstractions
🌳When a framework leaks implementation details (like serializing arguments at schedule time but loading code from HEAD at execution time), changing a function signature breaks the assumption that old code calls old signatures.
Check If Concern Is Systemic
🌳Before resolving a concern, check whether it is isolated or systemic.
Command Control Misnomer
🌳"Command and control" is a misnomer for directive governance.
Contributor Poker: Review as Investment
🌳In open source maintenance, PR review is not quality assurance — it is investment in a contributor's long-term development.
Confabulation Is Plausible
🌿AI agent confabulation is not random — it is plausible-looking wrongness constructed from pattern and proximity rather than knowledge.
Crisis Centralization Ratchet
🌿Tech companies centralize decision-making during crisis and almost never decentralize afterward.
Data Pipeline Is Achilles Heel
🌿The data pipeline is directive governance's Achilles heel, not the decision-maker's rationality.
Delegation Mimicry Without Cultural Substrate
🌿Most tech CEOs copy the structural form of delegation without the deliberate cultural investment that makes it work.