Agent Engineering

AI agents are showing up everywhere—and most of them are being built by trial and error. Agent Design Patterns distills the experience of a growing community of agent builders into 20+ composable, reusable patterns for building AI agents that are reliable, efficient, controllable, and easy to reason about. In this uniquely valuable book, author and NVIDIA Research scientist Peter Belcak gives you a durable engineering vocabulary and design intuition that outlasts any new model release.

Along the way you’ll build concrete applications—summarization and Q&A engines, context-aware chatbots with memory, and tool-using AI agents that orchestrate multi-step workflows with branching logic. For the examples, the book uses Python, LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith, but you’ll be able to generalize to other frameworks. You’ll understand with clarity and confidence how to keep integrations maintainable, manage context limits and cost/latency tradeoffs, and evaluate, debug, and monitor behavior so your systems work in production.

AI Agents in Action, Second Edition is a substantial revision and update of the first edition. It is a practical and comprehensive guide to building AI agents—not just understanding what they are, but designing, implementing, evaluating, and deploying them. Its strength is in the way it combines conceptual clarity with working code examples, so readers build progressively rather than absorb isolated ideas. The examples form a continuous learning path, moving from a minimal agent to more capable, tool-using, multi-agent, and deployable systems. Each step adds a new skill while reinforcing what came before.

Build an AI Agent (From Scratch) is a fascinating step-by-step journey through design, development, and deployment of a system of autonomous AI agents. Authors Jungjun Hur and Younghee Song guide you concept by concept as you build a sophisticated research agent in Python, designed to solve complex, multi-step tasks from the rigorous GAIA (General AI Assistants) benchmark. By seeing the construction of the system end to end, you’ll understand how the underlying mechanics are unobstructed by any existing blackbox libraries and frameworks.