The Agent Engineering Playbook

All lessons, in order.

A structured curriculum for engineers building real AI systems — designed to be read in sequence. New lessons and categories ship as they are written; the roadmap below is the honest state of things.

Part I — Prompt Engineering

6 lessons · 96 min

What Is Prompt Engineering? A First Principles Introduction A rigorous first-principles introduction to how prompts work, why they fail, and the core techniques that matter in practice. 18 min Building the Production System Prompt Master the five-component anatomy and decision protocols required to build reliable system prompts for production agents. 14 min Chain-of-Thought and Self-Consistency The technique that changed how we think about AI reasoning — the mechanism, seven variants, and self-consistency sampling. 16 min Prompt Chaining and Pipeline Design Why monolithic prompts break at scale, the four chain architectures, the router/dispatcher pattern, and when not to chain. 15 min RAG and Context Injection Chunking strategies, embeddings and hybrid search, context injection, and the four failure modes that make RAG look confidently wrong. 17 min Evaluation and Testing Building eval datasets, the metrics taxonomy, LLM-as-judge, and the regression pipeline that tells you when a system is ready to ship. 16 min

Part II — Tools & MCP

6 lessons · In writing

Tool Calling from First Principles Notify me

Designing Tools Agents Can Use Notify me

MCP Architecture Notify me

Building an MCP Server Notify me

Tool Reliability in Production Notify me

Tool Security Notify me

Part III — Agents

6 lessons · In writing

What an Agent Is Notify me

State and Memory Notify me

Planning and Reflection Notify me

Routing and Supervision Notify me

Multi-Agent Systems Notify me

Human-in-the-Loop Notify me

Part IV — Production

4 lessons · In writing

Observability and Tracing Notify me

Guardrails Notify me

Cost and Latency Notify me

Evaluating Agents Notify me

New here? Start with lesson 01.

The Playbook is written to be read in sequence. Eighteen minutes to the first idea that changes how you prompt.

Start the Playbook

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Got a system to build?

If you're building a RAG pipeline, an AI agent workflow, or an MCP integration and want to compare notes, swap ideas, or just avoid the mistakes I've already made — reach out.

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