# Rakesh Menon

> Rakesh Menon is the co-founder of Seerly, where autonomous agents help brands get found and cited in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, and the author of The Second Time Is a Bug, a field workbook for engineering with AI coding agents. Before Seerly he spent almost 15 years on frontend platforms, most recently at Atlassian, Maersk and Publicis Sapient. He is based in Bengaluru, India. This site is SublimeCoder (https://sublimecoder.io).

## Pages
- [Home](https://sublimecoder.io/): Who Rakesh is, common questions answered with sources, products, side quests, books, writing, a map of his work and his career.
- [Books](https://sublimecoder.io/books): The Second Time Is a Bug and The Someday Folder.
- [Writing](https://sublimecoder.io/writing): Selected articles on AI search, coding agents and engineering culture.
- [Experience](https://sublimecoder.io/experience): Roles, dates and results at Seerly, Atlassian, Maersk, Publicis Sapient, Langoor and Nokia.
- [Contact](https://sublimecoder.io/contact): Advisory enquiries.
- [Résumé (PDF)](https://sublimecoder.io/RakeshMenon_Resume.pdf)

## Now and products
- [Seerly](https://seerly.app): co-founder since Jun 2025. One organic growth channel for Google search and AI answers. Autonomous agents track your rankings and your citations in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, find the gaps and draft the content that wins them. Your team approves what ships.
- VenturePulse: Startup strategy and validation backed by real-time data and multi-model verification, from concept to pitch deck.
- AppRunner: Connect a GitHub repo and get a production-ready VM with Docker, HTTPS, crash alerts, metrics and logs, without a cloud console.
- [Advisory](https://sublimecoder.io/#help): agent-ready engineering, frontend platform architecture and technical leadership. Open to advisory work.

## Side quests
- [Got Cited?](https://gotcited.fyi): From the Seerly team. An interactive guide to how a page gets crawled, retrieved and cited in AI search, one step at a time, with a hands-on simulator.
- [How to Live on Earth](https://howtoliveonearth.life): An independent guide to the film. The documentary’s three big puzzles, its standout stories and the full film to watch, with in-browser visuals and an ambient soundscape that follows your scroll.

## Books
- [The Second Time Is a Bug](https://secondtimeisabug.com): published 22 Oct 2026 on Leanpub. A field workbook for engineering with AI coding agents. Turn each repeated mistake into a small, tested guard that lives in your repository and works with whichever agent, git hooks and CI system you use. 258 pages, 34 pattern cards, 26 offline drills, MIT companion code.
- [Free sample: Chapter 6](https://secondtimeisabug.com/sample/the-second-time-is-a-bug-chapter-6.pdf)
- [The Someday Folder](https://leanpub.com/thesomedayfolder): Turn unfinished ideas into small experiments with AI. Written in public on Leanpub, with new chapters every week.

## Writing
- [Do Guardrails Make AI Coding Agents Better? What 270 Runs Showed](https://secondtimeisabug.com/blog/coding-agent-guardrails-270-runs/): secondtimeisabug.com, 15 Oct 2026
- [What 1,866 Popular GitHub Projects Tell Their AI Coding Agents](https://secondtimeisabug.com/blog/what-projects-tell-ai-coding-agents/): secondtimeisabug.com, 15 Oct 2026
- [AGENTS.md Best Practices: Keep It Short and Make Every Rule Checkable](https://secondtimeisabug.com/blog/agents-md-best-practices/): secondtimeisabug.com, 14 Oct 2026
- [How to Stop an AI Coding Agent From Deleting, Skipping or Weakening Tests](https://secondtimeisabug.com/blog/stop-ai-agent-deleting-tests/): secondtimeisabug.com, 14 Oct 2026
- [The AI crawler access experiment: measure the trade-off before changing controls](https://seerly.app/blog/ai-crawler-access-experiment): Seerly blog, 13 Oct 2026
- [Why Your AI Coding Agent Keeps Making the Same Mistake](https://secondtimeisabug.com/blog/ai-coding-agent-same-mistake/): secondtimeisabug.com, 13 Oct 2026
- [The citation absorption experiment: proving whether your evidence influences AI answers](https://seerly.app/blog/citation-absorption-experiment-ai-answers): Seerly blog, 10 Oct 2026
- [Why AI citations depend on answerable passages, not content chunks](https://seerly.app/blog/ai-citations-answerable-passages-not-content-chunks): Seerly blog, 7 Oct 2026
- [Indexed Does Not Mean Cited: The Missing Funnel in AI Visibility](https://medium.com/the-discovery-collective/indexed-does-not-mean-cited-the-missing-funnel-in-ai-visibility-852c8ba49038): The Discovery Collective, 22 Aug 2026
- [The Hidden Pipeline Behind AI Search Visibility](https://medium.com/the-discovery-collective/the-hidden-pipeline-behind-ai-search-visibility-d4e9c22897f8): The Discovery Collective, 20 Aug 2026
- [The Pull Request Is Not the Product](https://medium.com/@rakeshmenon13/the-pull-request-is-not-the-product-c29da073a6a8): Medium, 27 Jul 2026
- [Your Website Is No Longer Your Brand: AI Is Reconstructing It From Everywhere Else](https://medium.com/the-discovery-collective/your-website-is-no-longer-your-brand-ai-is-reconstructing-it-from-everywhere-else-9d8a58c873b8): The Discovery Collective, 21 Jul 2026
- [Beyond Search: How AI Agents Are Changing Discoverability on the Internet](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond-search-how-ai-agents-changing-discoverability-internet-menon-emz0c): LinkedIn, 18 Mar 2026
- [How LLMs Decide Which Brands to Recommend (And How to Be One of Them)](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-llms-decide-which-brands-recommend-one-them-rakesh-menon-kf62e): LinkedIn, 17 Feb 2026
- [How to Perform an AI Visibility Audit to Measure Brand Presence Across AI Engines](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-perform-ai-visibility-audit-measure-brand-presence-rakesh-menon-je76c): LinkedIn, 29 Nov 2025

## Career
- Seerly, Co-Founder (Jun 2025 to now)
- Atlassian, Principal Engineer, Jira Platform (Jul 2024 to May 2025)
  7 Jira squads guided
- Maersk, Lead Platform Architect, Experience Engineering (Aug 2021 to Jun 2024)
  20+ apps unified; 99% performance SLO adherence
- Publicis Sapient, Senior Architect, eXperience Technology (Oct 2017 to Jul 2021)
- Publicis Sapient, Architect, eXperience Technology (Oct 2014 to Oct 2017)
  6 retail launches; 12 engineers mentored; 8 engagements led
- Langoor, Tech Manager (Sep 2013 to Oct 2014)
- Langoor, UI Lead, Products (Oct 2012 to Aug 2013)
- Langoor, Development Guru, langoor.mobi (Apr 2012 to Oct 2012)
- Nokia, Software Development Engineer (Aug 2011 to Mar 2012)
- Nokia, R&D Engineer, Web Development (Sep 2010 to Jul 2011)
  3 web prototypes; YUI 3 stack modernised

## How the work connects
- What led to Seerly? Platform craft, plus research into how AI answers find and cite pages.
- Why write the book? Rules that kept many teams consistent, rebuilt for coding agents and tested over 270 runs.
- Why The Someday Folder? Side projects, turned into a method for small experiments with AI.
- How I lead teams: Mentoring and RFCs, distilled into how engineering work should be judged.

## How I help
- Agent-ready engineering: Find where your team’s knowledge lives that coding agents cannot reach, then move it into instruction files and checks so the same mistake does not ship twice. You get: Harness audit of your repositories; Short, checkable instruction files; Guards wired into hooks and CI.
- Frontend platform architecture: For organisations running many apps that should feel like one product: micro-frontends, shared design systems and performance targets the whole org can see. You get: Target architecture and migration plan; Design system foundations; Performance SLOs and dashboards.
- Technical leadership: Principal-level guidance for teams without one: architecture reviews, an RFC process that gets decisions made, and mentoring for senior engineers. You get: Architecture and code reviews; RFC and decision-record process; Mentoring for senior engineers.

## Questions about Rakesh Menon
- Who is Rakesh Menon? Rakesh Menon is the co-founder of Seerly, where autonomous agents help brands get found and cited in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. He wrote The Second Time Is a Bug, a field workbook for engineering with AI coding agents. Before Seerly he spent almost 15 years on frontend platforms, most recently at Atlassian, Maersk and Publicis Sapient. He is based in Bengaluru, India.
- What has he built? At Seerly, which he co-founded and where he leads product, he is building autonomous agents that track a brand’s Google rankings and its citations in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, then draft the content that closes the gaps. At Atlassian he evolved the frontend foundations that 7 Jira squads build on. At Maersk he unified 20+ customer-facing apps into one platform, with frontend performance SLOs held to 99% adherence. Earlier, at Publicis Sapient, he built the server-rendered micro-frontend framework behind 6 global retail launches.
- Has he published anything? Yes. The Second Time Is a Bug, a field workbook for engineering with AI coding agents, came out on Leanpub in October 2026. He is writing a second book, The Someday Folder, in public, with new chapters every week. He also writes about AI search and coding agents on Medium, the Seerly blog and LinkedIn.
- What is Seerly? Seerly turns Google search and AI answers into one organic growth channel. Its autonomous agents track a brand’s rankings and its citations in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, find the gaps and draft the content that wins them, and the brand’s team approves what ships. Rakesh Menon co-founded it in 2025. The team also built Got Cited?, a free guide to how pages get cited in AI search.
- Why does he focus on AI search? He argues that AI assistants now describe a brand from what they find everywhere else, not just its own website, and that being indexed is not the same as being cited in an answer. Seerly, which he co-founded, puts autonomous agents on that problem: they find where a brand is missing from AI answers and draft the content that closes the gap.
- Can he help my team? Yes. He takes on advisory work in agent-ready engineering, frontend platform architecture and technical leadership. Each engagement leaves something the team keeps: guards in the repository, an architecture its engineers can run, or a decision written down.

## Skills and languages
- Toolbox: React, Node.js, GraphQL, Micro-frontends, Design systems, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, AI/ML
- Languages: English, Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali

## Elsewhere
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rakesh-menon-xt/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/rakeshmenon)
- [X](https://x.com/SublimeCoderX)
- [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/rakeshmenon/)
- [Medium](https://medium.com/@rakeshmenon13)
- [Seerly blog](https://seerly.app/blog/author/rakesh-menon)