HEAD FIRST
DEVELOPER.
HEAD FIRST DEVELOPER A TECHNICAL PUBLICATION

Engineering
AI Systems
from First Principles.

Understand the concepts. Build the systems.
Measure what actually works.

Explore the areas
FIG. 01 / THE ENGINEERING LOOP
From a question to a measured systemA question leads to a model, a system, and an evaluation. Evidence from evaluation loops back to improve the model.MODELSYSTEMEVALQUESTION010203EVIDENCE → ITERATIONREAL-WORLD CONSTRAINTS
Understanding is the output. Evidence is the way.
CONCEPTS → CODE → EVIDENCEFOR ENGINEERS WHO GO DEEP
01THE EXPLORATION

Deep dives. No shortcuts.

The systems beneath the surface, taken apart and understood.

PLANNED COVERAGE
AREA / 01

Production RAG

Beyond the vector database. Retrieval, context, and the decisions that make a system reliable.

RETRIEVAL / CONTEXT / EVALUATION
AREA / 02

Agent Systems

From a single tool call to coordinated systems. Reasoning about control, memory, and failure.

TOOLS / ORCHESTRATION / MEMORY
AREA / 03

LLM Engineering

What happens beyond the API. The trade-offs behind inference, adaptation, and deployment.

INFERENCE / ADAPTATION / SYSTEMS

An outline of what’s ahead. Articles and implementations are not published yet.

02THE METHOD

Build → Measure → Explain

A working implementation is the beginning of understanding.

  1. 01
    Learn a concept
  2. 02
    Implement it
  3. 03
    Evaluate it
  4. 04
    Benchmark it
  5. 05
    Understand failure modes
  6. 06
    Explain what we learned

Every result is a question. What worked, what broke, and why?

REPEAT WITH BETTER QUESTIONS.
03THE TERRITORY

Connected ideas.
Deeper understanding.

From research papers to running systems.

01Prompts02RAG03Agents04Evals & Guardrails05Concepts06Good Reads07System Design
THE POINT OF IT ALL

Less hand-waving.
More understanding.

A technical publication for engineers who want to know how AI systems work—and what it takes to make them work in the real world.