# Manik Soin

> Manik Soin is a software architect in Hong Kong who builds payment infrastructure and applied AI systems (hybrid RAG, agent harnesses, LLM evaluation). He is Software Architect at Hero Plus Group, where he runs multi-gateway, PCI DSS compliant payments across Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

- Role: Software Architect, Hero Plus Group (2024 to present)
- Location: Hong Kong
- Education: BEng Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong
- Focus: payment systems, retrieval-augmented generation, AI agents, distributed systems
- Contact: manik.soin@gmail.com

Every blog post and project below is also available as plain markdown by appending `.md` to its URL path.

## Writing

- [Money Has No Undo Button: Agents in the Payment Flow](https://maniksoin.com/blog/agents-in-the-payment-flow.md): Money movement is largely irreversible, which makes payments one of the harder places to point an autonomous agent. Here is how I currently think about putting one there safely.
- [Giving Claude Hands: Building Tools an Agent Can Use](https://maniksoin.com/blog/building-tools-your-agent-can-use.md): An agent is only as capable as the tools you give it, and tools are where the real engineering — and the real risk — lives. How I build safe, focused MCP tools for payment operations.
- [The Comprehension Debt: Trusting Code That Nobody Understands](https://maniksoin.com/blog/trusting-code-nobody-understands.md): Agents produce code faster than anyone can read it, and the deepest cost is comprehension debt, not bugs: software that runs while no one understands it. Verification can let you trust code you never read; that is necessary, and it is not the same as understanding it. What property-based testing, simulation, and proof can buy, and what they can't.
- [How I Delegate to Claude: Five Patterns That Stuck](https://maniksoin.com/blog/five-claude-code-workflow-patterns.md): Five agentic coding patterns I keep reaching for — sequential, operator, split-and-merge, agent teams, and headless — plus the machinery (CLAUDE.md, subagents, slash commands, plan-first) that makes delegation repeatable and verifiable.
- [One Retrieval Wasn't Enough: Rebuilding Ordinance as an Agent](https://maniksoin.com/blog/from-rag-to-agent-harnessing-ordinance.md): Why a one-shot RAG pipeline hit its ceiling on real regulatory questions, and how rebuilding Ordinance as an agent put the engineering in the harness around the model.
- [The Model Is Rarely the Bottleneck: Anatomy of an Agent Harness](https://maniksoin.com/blog/anatomy-of-an-agent-harness.md): The model is just one input into a running agent. The harness around it — prompt, tools, context, subagents — is the engineering discipline that decides whether an agent ships.
- [Building a RAG System for Hong Kong Building Regulations](https://maniksoin.com/blog/building-rag-for-hk-regulations.md): How I built Ordinance — a retrieval-augmented generation system that answers questions about HK compliance with cited, verifiable responses across 224 government documents.
- [Hello World](https://maniksoin.com/blog/hello-world.md): Welcome to my blog. I'll be writing about software engineering, payments, and building products.

## Projects

- [Ordinance](https://maniksoin.com/projects/ordinance.md): Agentic research system for Hong Kong building regulations — hybrid retrieval, focused tools, and verification over 15,000+ chunks across 240 government documents.
- [Hero Plus Payment Platform](https://maniksoin.com/projects/hero-plus.md): Multi-gateway payment platform processing transactions across Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore.
- [Telephone](https://maniksoin.com/projects/telephone.md): Outbound voice-AI platform — an agent that places and holds live phone calls on a user's behalf, with verified caller ID and a blocking compliance engine in the call path.
- [Stroke Rehabilitation AR](https://maniksoin.com/projects/stroke-rehab.md): AR therapeutic games for stroke rehabilitation using computer vision and Unity. Research project at HKU that increased therapy adherence by 40%.
- [Solvfit](https://maniksoin.com/projects/solvfit.md): Skill-based talent matching platform with explainable scoring algorithms. Co-founded to reduce hiring biases and improve placement precision.
- [QRun](https://maniksoin.com/projects/qrun.md): Location-based orientation game app that gamifies facility familiarization through QR code scavenger hunts. Led development as part of HKU COMP3330.

## Profiles

- [Website](https://maniksoin.com/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/manik-soin)
- [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/maniksoin)
- [RSS feed](https://maniksoin.com/rss.xml)

## Optional

- [Full profile and every post in one file](https://maniksoin.com/llms-full.txt)