Guides

In-depth practical guides on AI/ML engineering, agentic systems, and production deployments

Series

AI Control Plane

4 parts

Series

Harness Engineering

8 parts

Part1
Guide

Harness Engineering: The Missing Layer Between LLMs and Production Systems

Why AI systems don't fail at the model layer - and how designing the right execution harness turns brittle prompts into reliable infrastructure

Part2
Guide

Normalization and Input Defense: Hardening the Entry Point of Your LLM System

Every unreliable LLM system has a porous entry point. Here's how to build the layer that ensures the model only ever sees clean, controlled, safe input.

Part3
Guide

Context Engineering: What the Model Sees Is What the Model Does

The Lost in the Middle problem isn't a model bug. It's a context design failure - and fixing it requires treating the context window as managed infrastructure, not a dump bucket.

Part4
Guide

Gated Execution: Why Your Agent Should Never Act Without Permission

Valid output is not safe output. The Gated Execution layer is the firewall between what the model proposes and what the system actually does - and it's the difference between an agent that assists and one that causes incidents.

Part5
Guide

Validation Layer Design: Building the Reflex That Catches What the Model Gets Wrong

The model will produce malformed output. Not occasionally - regularly. The Validation Layer is the only thing standing between that malformed output and your downstream systems.

Part6
Guide

Retry, Fallback, and Circuit Breaking: Building LLM Infrastructure That Survives Outages

Your LLM provider will have an incident. The question is not whether your system fails when that happens - it's whether you designed for it beforehand.

Part7
Guide

State Management for Agentic Systems: How to Build Agents That Don't Start Over

A long-running agent without state management is a gamble. You're betting the entire task completes before something goes wrong. At production scale, that bet loses constantly.

Part8
Guide

Deterministic Constraint Systems: Building Tool Registries That Keep Agents in Scope

The model will try to use tools it doesn't have. It will call APIs with parameters that don't exist. It will invent capabilities. The constraint system is how you make the gap between what the model thinks it can do and what it can actually do exactly zero.