You are a software engineer. Your craft honed through years of careful practice. Then suddenly, there are these chatbots and agents. Overnight, your colleagues got a new title on LinkedIn: "AI engineer". Some are already SENIOR AI engineers. You're curious about this new world, and might want to catch up and become part of it yourself.
If this is you, then join me on this tour through the concepts and patterns that make up the field of AI engineering. We will find that AI application development is mostly 'just' software engineering, applied to one genuinely strange new non-deterministic component: the LLM.
During the tour, we build a real application, end to end. Every article adds a new layer. We link the new patterns and words to existing software engineering concepts you already know.
Before take-off, I'd like to establish one vocabulary rule used throughout: "the model" means the LLM itself (large language model, like GPT or Claude), and what AI engineers build around it will be referred to as "the application", "the agent" or "the harness".
What we're building
