The current AI landscape is thick with "smoke." Between infinite buzzwords and thousands of AI posts and infographics, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern what is actually a new architectural breakthrough versus what is just marketing noise.
With that in mind, here is a breakdown of the 4 core AI design patterns for development:
1. The Pipeline (Prompt Chaining)
The Pipeline is the foundational pattern of AI Engineering. It treats tasks as a linear sequence of specialized nodes, where the output of one instance becomes the structured input for the next. This provides much-needed granularity to the development process.
A classic example of this is Spec-Driven Development. Rather than asking an AI to "build an app," we chain specialized instances together:
