Intelligence For Beings Who Can't Tell You What They Feel

Nitin Murali is VP of Supply Chain Excellence at Gallo and founder of Category 2 (cat2.ai).

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I didn't set out to build a framework. I set out to keep my dog alive. The framework found me.

Six years ago, on a cold sunny day, we drove to the Orange County airport to welcome a new member into our family. We named him Loki. He was the first dog I ever interacted with so deeply. His curiosity about the world was fascinating to watch. I could feel my heart grow bigger as the days went by, and I grew into loving him, caring for him, without knowing what that really meant.

Curiosity. A word derived from curiosus and cura. Cura. Care.

I think in systems for a living. Loki taught me something about broken systems that all my professional experience had not.

We moved states with him. From California to New Jersey. My best memory of Loki includes him playing in the snow for the first time. I thank the stars for giving me the wherewithal to record it.

When The Systems Broke

In October 2024, Loki got sick—jaundice. We were referred to UC Davis, the second-best teaching veterinary school in the world. Over the next several months, we spent over thirty thousand dollars. Surgery. A stent. A liver biopsy. Steroids that triggered diabetes because nobody in the system flagged that he might have been pre-diabetic. After all of that, no diagnosis.

They gave him two to three months.

Every system around Loki had failed him. Because the systems had no memory, no continuity and no way to deliver the right signal to the right person at the right time. One vet didn't know what the other had tried. Nobody could see the whole picture.

So I built my own. Using Anthropic's Claude, I started uploading everything: bloodwork, medications, symptoms, diet. The system learned Loki's baseline. It observed when something shifted. It knew enough context to attach meaning to the change. And it surfaced what I needed to know so I could intervene—not the AI, me. The decision was always mine.

A twenty-dollar monthly subscription filled the gap that thirty thousand dollars in the veterinary system could not. Loki lived fourteen more months. Not just survived. Lived. Tail wags. Moments I would not trade for anything.

And Then He Was Gone

Loki was curious until the very end. On his last day, he was struggling to just shift his body to a comfortable position so that he could sleep better. He couldn't. And then he was gone.

I was furious. Devastated. Not just because the grief was unbearable. Because the systems that were supposed to help us never talked to each other, never remembered what they'd seen and never once delivered a signal framed for the decision I actually needed to make.

And building is how I carry him forward.

Learn, Observe, Know, Intervene

I built an app. I named it after him. LOKI: Learn, Observe, Know, Intervene. Four words that came from what I did to keep him alive. I did not set out to build a framework. The framework found me.

Learn

The system I built for Loki remembered everything. But every time we saw a new vet, they started from zero. Every organization knows this feeling. Systems without memory make humans the memory, and humans leave.

Observe

I had to watch for the subtle shifts myself because the monitoring system couldn't see them until it was too late. In any complex operation, the signals that matter most are the ones that arrive before the crisis, not after it.

Know

Raw data meant nothing without context attached to a specific decision. A lab value going up is not a signal. A lab value going up in a patient on this medication with this history, and here is what it means for the decision you need to make today—that is a signal. The difference between data and signal is meaning.

Intervene

The point was never to replace my judgment. It was to make my judgment possible. AI recommends. Human owns the outcome. Without that boundary, automation replaces judgment instead of preserving it.

Vibe coded in seven days. I am not a coder. My curiosity, fueled by grief, led me to build it. The app went live on iOS, Android and web.

The Same Flaw, Everywhere

The architecture I built for a dog turned out to be the same architecture missing in every system I have worked with.

Your supply chain can't tell you what it feels either. The operators are the ones who sense it. And most of the time, we are failing them the same way the veterinary system failed Loki. We give them dozens of dashboards and expect them to assemble meaning from noise. The systems have amnesia. The signals arrive without context. And when the experienced planner retires, the knowledge retires with them.

Grief does not stop you from working. It changes what you see.

Curiosity Is Care

Six years I had with him. Years I would give anything to get back. But what he left me I can pass forward: the conviction that the problems worth solving are the ones you care about. Not the ones on the roadmap. Not the ones in the RFP. The ones that keep you up at night because somebody, somewhere, is not getting the signal they need to make the right call.

"Be curious, not judgmental." Walt Whitman, I know. He was right.

Every system we build will keep failing until we give it the ability to learn what happened last time, observe what just changed, know why it matters and put the intervention where it belongs: in the hands of the human who will live with the outcome.

I learned those four words trying to keep my dog alive. Learn. Observe. Know. Intervene. LOKI lives.

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