https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog Practical writing on AI-driven QA, automation, agentic systems, and the AI bull/bear case for public software companies. en-us Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:03:42 GMT 1440 https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/what-i-stopped-doing-after-a-year-of-coding-with-agents https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/what-i-stopped-doing-after-a-year-of-coding-with-agents Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation After a year of writing most of my code with an agent in the loop, I have a list of habits I had to stop. Five of them, with the bug or wasted hour behind each. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-five-rules-i-do-not-break-on-sundays https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-five-rules-i-do-not-break-on-sundays Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation Running an automated stack solo means Sundays are the most dangerous day of the week. Here are the five rules I have written for myself, and why I learned each one the hard way. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-things-about-market-regimes-i-only-learned-in-live https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-things-about-market-regimes-i-only-learned-in-live Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials OpenClaw's regime classifier looked clean in code review. Six months of live paper-trading taught me three things no backtest ever surfaced. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/four-silent-failures-in-my-own-stack-a-friday-postmortem https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/four-silent-failures-in-my-own-stack-a-friday-postmortem Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career & Best Practices Four things in my content automation stack failed this week without paging me. Here is what the logs actually said, and what I rebuilt after I caught each one. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-backtest-failure-modes-that-cost-me-real-money https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-backtest-failure-modes-that-cost-me-real-money Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials Every backtest I've built looked fine on a Sharpe chart. The ones that broke in paper had the same three leaks. Here are the checks I run now before I trust any curve. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-snowflake-snow https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-snowflake-snow Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown SNOW is down 69% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $5.1bn growing 30% Y/Y with 125% NRR. The bear: AI agents prefer cheap, lightning-fast queries Snowflake makes expensive. The bull: 10,000+ enterprises already centralized here — the battle for data is over. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-freshworks-frsh https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-freshworks-frsh Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown Down 84% from its 2021 IPO peak, Freshworks just posted its first full-year GAAP profit and $917M ARR. Freddy AI is at $25M ARR with 8,000 paying customers. But AI-native ITSM and CX startups are compressing the exact market Freshworks built its SMB moat in. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/qa-engineer-career-growth-2026 https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/qa-engineer-career-growth-2026 Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career & Growth The QA landscape is shifting faster than most engineers realize. Here's the honest breakdown of which skills will make you irreplaceable in 2026 and beyond. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-okta-okta https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-okta-okta Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown OKTA is down 71% from its 2022 peak. ARR is $2.7bn growing 13% Y/Y. Microsoft Entra is free with M365 and a 2023 breach shattered trust. But every AI agent needs an identity layer — and non-human identity management is a brand new $50bn problem. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-an-automated-options-trading-bot-heres-what-happened https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-an-automated-options-trading-bot-heres-what-happened Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials I wired up a regime-based options trading bot with AI signal filtering and let it run. Here's everything I learned about what works, what blew up, and what I'd do differently. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-unity-u https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-unity-u Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown Unity is down 91% from its 2021 peak after a catastrophic runtime fee announcement that alienated its entire developer base. But the 3D engine powering 70% of mobile games might be the unexpected infrastructure winner of the AI-generated content era. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-replaced-half-my-qa-team-with-playwright-ai-agents-heres-what-happened https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-replaced-half-my-qa-team-with-playwright-ai-agents-heres-what-happened Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT QA Engineering After six months running AI-assisted testing with Playwright's MCP integration and self-healing tests in production, I have thoughts. Spoiler: it's not the apocalypse QA engineers feared. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-veeva-veev https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-veeva-veev Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown VEEV is down 43% from its 2021 peak but is one of the most defensible businesses in public software. A 22% GAAP operating margin at $3bn ARR with 120% NRR tells the whole story. The AI risk is real but underestimated — so is the moat. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/april-2026-ai-agent-llm-breakthroughs-qa-engineers https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/april-2026-ai-agent-llm-breakthroughs-qa-engineers Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation April 2026 has been a landmark month for agentic AI and LLM releases. Here's my breakdown of what's actually shipping, what it means for QA engineers, and why your test strategy needs to evolve right now. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-gitlab-gtlb https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-gitlab-gtlb Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown GTLB is down 61% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $820M growing 26% Y/Y with 120% NRR. GitHub Copilot has dominated AI coding headlines, but GitLab is building the complete DevSecOps platform — and Duo AI embedded in CI/CD and security scanning may be more valuable than autocomplete. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-backtested-every-sp500-stock-with-ai-and-found-the-only-pattern-that-actually-works https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-backtested-every-sp500-stock-with-ai-and-found-the-only-pattern-that-actually-works Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Quantitative Trading After 3 months of backtesting 500 stocks across dozens of technical and fundamental signals, I found exactly four patterns with statistically robust edges. Most popular strategies are completely random. Here's what the data actually shows. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-confluent-cflt https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-confluent-cflt Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown CFLT is down 71% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $1.1bn growing 22% Y/Y with 118% NRR. AWS and Redpanda are eating managed Kafka from below. But real-time event streaming is the nervous system of every AI agent deployment — and Confluent owns the standard. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-engineered-a-real-time-options-flow-scanner-here-is-what-the-smart-money-looks-like https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-engineered-a-real-time-options-flow-scanner-here-is-what-the-smart-money-looks-like Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Quantitative Trading Unusual options activity precedes major stock moves more often than most people realize. I built a scanner that monitors live options flow, filters for institutional-sized bets, and alerts me before the news breaks. Here's the full system and what I've learned. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-elastic-estc https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-elastic-estc Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown ESTC is down 58% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $1.6bn growing 17% Y/Y. The bear: AWS forked it, Pinecone and Weaviate eat the vector DB market. The bull: hybrid search (keyword + semantic) is what enterprise RAG actually needs — and Elasticsearch is already embedded in everything. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-a-news-sentiment-ai-that-predicts-stock-moves-24-hours-early https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-a-news-sentiment-ai-that-predicts-stock-moves-24-hours-early Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Quantitative Trading After years of watching market-moving news break on Twitter before it hit the wire, I built a real-time NLP pipeline that ingests financial news, scores sentiment with an LLM, and flags tickers before the crowd catches on. Here's the full architecture. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-docusign-docu https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-docusign-docu Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown DOCU is down 75% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $2.9bn growing 9% Y/Y. E-signature has become a commodity, but the contract lifecycle management market is $10bn and growing — and DocuSign's Maestro AI platform is the most credible pivot in enterprise SaaS. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/ai-agents-automating-testing-2026 https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/ai-agents-automating-testing-2026 Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation The AI agent revolution isn't coming to QA. It's already here. From self-healing tests to autonomous quality operations, here's what manufacturers are actually doing with agentic AI in 2026. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-zoom-zm https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-zoom-zm Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown ZM is down 87% from its 2020 peak. Revenue is $4.8bn growing just 4% Y/Y. Microsoft Teams is free. But Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Phone, and Contact Center are quietly building a platform play that analysts who wrote off Zoom in 2022 are now scrambling to re-underwrite. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/career-resilience-5-5-5-rule-qa-testing https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/career-resilience-5-5-5-rule-qa-testing Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career & Best Practices After 20 years in QA engineering, I realized I was operating with a single-point-of-failure career. The 5-5-5 Rule changed how I think about skill diversity, career paths, and professional resilience in 2026. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-twilio-twlo https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-twilio-twlo Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown TWLO is down 87% from its 2021 peak. Revenue is $4.2bn growing 9% Y/Y at 2x EV/Revenue. Bears say AI agents don't need SMS APIs. Bulls say AI contact center is a $50bn market and Twilio owns the communications layer. Both are right — the question is timing. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/openclaw-production-ai-agent-runtime-2026 https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/openclaw-production-ai-agent-runtime-2026 Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials OpenClaw isn't just another AI orchestration tool. After three months running it in production alongside my QA pipeline, it's become the nervous system of my entire operation. Here's what 700K+ engineers and thousands of companies figured out before I did. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-hubspot-hubs https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-hubspot-hubs Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown HUBS is down 52% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $2.7bn growing 21% Y/Y with 103% NRR. Clay, Apollo, and Instantly are routing around CRM entirely — but HubSpot's Breeze AI may be making the platform dramatically better before the window closes. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/how-i-automated-our-entire-qa-triage-process-with-ai-agents https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/how-i-automated-our-entire-qa-triage-process-with-ai-agents Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT QA Automation When CI failures went from 8 per sprint to 50+, we hit a wall. Manual triage was unsustainable. So I built an AI agent pipeline that classifies, prioritizes, and routes failures autonomously. Flakiness dropped 68%, and our engineers got back 12 hours per sprint. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-cloudflare-net https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-cloudflare-net Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown NET is down 40% from its 2021 peak but is the most intellectually interesting infrastructure company in public markets. ARR is $2.3bn growing 27% Y/Y. Workers AI positions Cloudflare as edge inference infrastructure — something AWS, Azure, and GCP physically cannot replicate. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-mongodb-mdb https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-mongodb-mdb Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown MDB is down 63% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $1.9bn growing 22% Y/Y. Postgres with pgvector and Supabase are commoditizing the lower end. But MongoDB Atlas Vector Search is building on top of the data model that AI applications actually prefer.