| title | Preface |
|---|---|
| description | Introduction to this guide on agentic engineering |
| author | Jaymin West |
| created | 2025-12-08 |
| last_updated | 2025-12-08 |
This is my personal guide to agentic engineering—built from hands-on experience, not abstractions.
The field moves fast. Models improve. Tools evolve. But the underlying principles—how to think about prompts, context, tools, and their interactions—remain more stable than the specific implementations.
This book captures what I've learned building agentic systems. It's organized to be useful both as a reference and as a coherent narrative.
You're likely:
- Building applications with LLMs that take actions, not just generate text
- Trying to move beyond "prompt and pray" to systematic approaches
- Interested in the craft of making agents reliable, debuggable, and maintainable
Part 1: Foundations covers the four pillars—prompt, model, context, and tooling. These are the fundamental building blocks.
Part 2: Craft covers patterns and practices—the recurring architectures that work and the operational knowledge for running agents in production.
Part 3: Perspectives offers mental models and specific tool guidance—frameworks for thinking about this space.
Appendices contain real examples from production projects.
This book is private until it isn't.