Mumbai's dabbawalas run the best multi-agent system on earth. Your AI agents are still learning.
Around 5,000 dabbawalas move about two lakh tiffins across Mumbai every day. No central brain, no app, just a shared protocol painted on a lid and handoffs everyone trusts. Now software is being built by swarms of AI agents, and most teams can't tell you whether the work was right. The Dabbawala Protocol is about how we specify, build, check and run software when agents do the heavy lifting, and how you know any of it worked.
Your Agent Is a Great Sprinter and a Terrible Relay Runner: 95% alone, 51% in a chain
Agents finish 95% of tickets alone and 51% of twenty-ticket chains. Plus: PHP files that LLMs broke and a rule-based tool left alone, a story format agents can't misread, why trimming your prompt can raise your bill, and a 90% merge rate that proves nothing.
Next issue: Tuesday 24 November 2026.
The best multi-agent system in the world runs on a painted lid
A tiffin leaves a kitchen in Borivali in the morning. It changes hands at a railway station, rides a packed local train, changes hands again and lands on the right desk in Nariman Point before lunch. Four or five handoffs, no tracking, and it almost never goes missing. The secret isn't smarter dabbawalas. It's the protocol.
Now look at how your team ships software this year. One agent drafts the spec, another writes the code, a third reviews it, and a human skims the PR at 7 pm. Every handoff is a place for a tiffin to go missing. And nobody painted the lid.
The industry is racing to sell you more agents. Hardly anyone is talking about the protocol: the specs, the context, the checks and the handoffs that make agents deliver. Deep enough for the engineer, useful enough for the PM, blunt enough for the leader signing the cheque.
More agents won't save you. A better protocol might.
What lands in your inbox every second Tuesday
Fair warning: this newsletter has opinions. Every issue takes a side, shows its numbers, and tells you what would change my mind.
Is this you?
Not for you if you want "10 AI tools that will change your life". There are plenty of those. This isn't one.
Who's writing this?
I'm Ved Muthal, a product manager with 13+ years across banking, insurance, retail and platforms. These days I work on AI platforms for software delivery, which means I spend my week watching agents do brilliant things and baffling things, sometimes in the same PR. This newsletter is what I'd tell you over cutting chai: what's real, what's hype, and the numbers behind both.
Views are my own, not my employer's.
- How often?
- Every second Tuesday. Never more.
- Is it free?
- Yes.
- Do you pitch products?
- No. I'll call out a hyped claim from anyone, including companies I like. I won't sell you anything.
- Can I share it?
- Please do. Issues are published under CC BY 4.0, so reuse them with credit: borrow the tiffin, just leave my name on the lid.
- Will you sell my email?
- Never. Not even for a good vada pav.
- Where else can I read it?
- On LinkedIn too, but the inbox gets it first.