Building AI Systems, One Project at a Time 🚀

Software engineer Ilakkiyan has announced plans to document his work in AI engineering, LLMs, and AI agents on DEV.to, emphasizing the importance of data, architecture, reliability, and user experience in building AI applications. His recent projects include Sofi, an offline AI desktop assistant, and Medorc, a secure healthcare platform for real-time health data orchestration.

Hey DEV Community 👋 I’m Ilakkiyan , a Software Engineer and AI Builder interested in the space where software engineering meets artificial intelligence . I’ve always enjoyed building things — not just following tutorials, but taking an idea, figuring out how it should work, and turning it into a real system. That journey has led me from traditional full-stack development into AI engineering, LLMs, AI agents, and intelligent applications . Right now, I’m particularly interested in: One thing I’ve learned is that building AI applications isn't simply about calling an LLM API. The interesting engineering problems are often around data, architecture, reliability, tool usage, context, evaluation, security, and user experience . That's where I want to spend more time. One of my recent projects is Sofi , an offline AI desktop assistant. The goal was to explore what happens when an AI assistant doesn't depend entirely on cloud APIs. The system combines technologies such as: Working on projects like this has made me more interested in the engineering behind AI systems — especially how different components come together to create something that actually feels like a product. I've also worked on Medorc , a secure healthcare platform focused on real-time health data orchestration and decision support. Each project has taught me something different. I'm joining DEV.to because I want to learn in public . Instead of keeping everything inside my laptop, I want to document: Some posts will probably be polished. Some might be experiments. And some will probably start with: “I had no idea what I was doing, so I tried this…” That's part of the process. I'm planning to spend the coming months going deeper into AI engineering and agentic systems , while continuing to strengthen my foundations in software engineering. I'll be sharing the journey here — including projects, experiments, technical deep dives, failures, and lessons learned. If you're also building with AI, LLMs, agents, or full-stack technologies , I'd love to connect and learn from your work. This is Day 1. Build → Break → Learn → Build Better. 🚀 — Ilakkiyan