The AI Agent Engineer

1. Ch 1

   What an Agent Actually Is

   Strip away the hype and an agent is one small idea: a model that runs in a loop, calls tools, sees the results, and decides when it's done.…

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2. Ch 2

   Tools & Function Calling

   Tools are how an agent touches the world. The model never runs code — it emits a structured request to use a tool, you execute it, and you hand the…

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3. Ch 3

   The Agent Loop & Stopping

   The loop is easy to write and easy to get catastrophically wrong. Two failure modes bracket every agent: it stops too early (returns a half-done…

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4. Ch 4

   Planning & Task Decomposition

   A model that decides each step one at a time is reactive — good at adapting, bad at not wandering. Planning makes it lay out the steps first. Used…

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5. Ch 5

   Memory & Context Management

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

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6. Ch 6

   Multi-Agent Systems

   The instinct to "add another agent" is strong and usually wrong. Multi-agent architectures solve real problems — parallelism and separation of…

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7. Ch 7

   Reliability & Failure Handling

   Demos work on the happy path. Production is the unhappy path: tools time out, return garbage, or contradict each other; the model loops or…

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8. Ch 8

   Evaluating Agents

   You cannot improve what you can't measure, and agents are unusually hard to measure: the same task can succeed via a good path or a lucky one, fail…

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9. Ch 9

   Human-in-the-Loop & Permissions

   Autonomy is a dial, not a switch. The engineering question is never "should the agent be autonomous?" but "which actions can it take alone, and…

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10. Ch 10

    Production Agents

    Everything so far makes an agent that works. Production makes it work at 3 a.m. under load, on a budget, when you're not watching. That means…

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11. Ch 11

    Advanced Patterns

    Once the fundamentals hold, a handful of patterns push agents further — reflection, tool retrieval at scale, subagents, and code-execution. Each is…

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12. Ch 12

    Tools of the Trade & Interview Prep

    You now have the mental models and the measurement discipline. This chapter maps them onto the real tools you'll name in an interview, then…

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The AI Agent Engineer · AI Engineer Dojo · Other editions