AI Agents: The Definitive Guide. Design, Deployment, and Evaluation for Production

As AI agents move from research labs into production, engineering teams face mounting challenges—fragile tools, rising inference costs, erratic behavior, and unmet expectations. AI Agents: The Definitive Guide addresses what most books avoid: how to design, deploy, and maintain real AI agents that actually work in the real world, not just in demos. Written by Nicole Koenigstein, this book offers the practical, system-level foundations needed to build robust, scalable, and secure agentic systems. Whether you're tasked with making agent prototypes production-ready or building mission-critical automation from the ground up, this book guides you through every layer of the stack, without being framework-dependent. It covers architectures, tool integration, performance optimization, safety strategies, and advanced evaluation, with a relentless focus on reliability and long-term value. Design stateful, reasoning, and multi-agent systems Apply reinforcement learning, search, and test-time compute Build reliable tool integration and execution boundaries Evaluate agents across development and production Design memory, monitoring, fallbacks, and efficient infrastructure Secure agents through isolation, governance, and threat modeling