The AI Agent Engineer

1. Start Here

   Before You Start

   This book is for engineers who build agents: systems where a language model calls tools in a loop until a task is done. Each chapter also ends with…

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2. Ch 1

   What an Agent Is

   Take away the hype and an agent is one small idea: a model running in a loop, calling tools, reading the results and deciding when it's finished.…

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3. Ch 2

   Tools & Function Calling

   Tools are how an agent affects the world. The model never runs code: it asks for a tool, your code runs it, and you hand back the result. Most of an…

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4. Ch 3

   The Agent Loop & Stopping

   The loop is easy to write and easy to get badly wrong. Agents fail in two opposite ways: they stop too early with half an answer, or they never stop…

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5. Ch 4

   Planning & Task Decomposition

   An agent that picks each step as it goes adapts well and tends to wander. Planning has it lay out the steps first. Used well, planning cuts steps…

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6. Ch 5

   Memory & Context Management

   An agent's memory is its context window until you give it something better. Left alone, that context grows every turn until it's slow, expensive and…

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7. Ch 6

   Multi-Agent Systems

   The urge to add another agent is strong and usually wrong. Multi-agent designs solve real problems, parallel work and separation of concerns, but…

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8. Ch 7

   Reliability & Failure Handling

   Demos follow the happy path. In production, tools time out, return garbage or contradict each other, and the model loops or invents a tool that…

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9. Ch 8

   Evaluating Agents

   Agents are unusually hard to measure. The same task can succeed through a good path or a lucky one, and fail through a wrong answer or a thirty-step…

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10. Ch 9

    Human Approval & Permissions

    Autonomy isn't all or nothing. The question to ask is which actions the agent may take alone and which need a person to say yes. Getting that line…

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11. Ch 10

    Production Agents

    Everything so far produces an agent that works. Production means it keeps working at 3 a.m., under load and on a budget, while nobody's watching.…

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12. Ch 11

    Advanced Patterns

    Once the basics hold, a few patterns take agents further: self-review, retrieving tools from a large catalog, agents used as tools, and code…

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13. Ch 12

    Tools, Interviews & Hiring

    This chapter maps the book onto the tools you'll name in interviews, goes through the questions you're likely to get, and closes with notes on…

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