Reviewed AI Agent Guides

Thirty-three practical guides reviewed for unsupported claims, dated evidence, and reader value. Fast-changing facts link to primary sources; system-design advice states assumptions and limits.

These guides are independent educational material, not vendor endorsements. Each article identifies the responsible editorial desk, its review date, and the review method. You can also report a correction.

What qualifies for this library

Original utility

A guide must add a decision framework, worked calculation, contract, threat model, or reproducible test plan—not merely restate vendor documentation.

Traceable evidence

Changing technical claims link to primary sources. Illustrative numbers and proposed experiments are labeled so readers do not mistake them for production measurements.

Maintained boundaries

Indexed guides disclose review dates, limitations, and correction paths. Draft or unsupported pages stay outside the sitemap until they meet the same standard.

Architecture · Aug 2026

Fine-Tuning vs RAG

Compare retrieval, training, and hybrid systems with a worked decision case, fair test set, cost model, and rollout gates.

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Cost engineering · Aug 2026

LLM API Cost Planning

Work through an auditable monthly estimate, sensitivity analysis, trace schema, and forecast validation process.

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Performance · Aug 2026

Prompt Caching

Calculate cache break-even, fingerprint reusable prefixes, and run a reproducible cold-versus-warm experiment.

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Architecture and orchestration

State · Aug 2026

AI Agent Memory

Separate working, episodic, semantic, and procedural memory with explicit write, retrieval, and deletion rules.

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Retrieval · Aug 2026

Agentic RAG

Turn retrieval into an observable state machine with bounded retries, evidence checks, and abstention.

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Optimization · Aug 2026

DSPy Optimization

Build a reproducible compile-and-evaluate loop with representative examples, metrics, and a held-out set.

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Evaluation, reliability, and security

Testing · Aug 2026

Agentic Testing

Combine deterministic checks, rubric evaluation, adversarial cases, replay, and production monitoring.

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Prompt engineering · Aug 2026

Prompt Compression

Reduce tokens only after checking answer quality, citation retention, instruction survival, latency, and spend.

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Developer workflows and deployment

Self-hosting · Aug 2026

Self-Host DeepSeek-R1

Size hardware from the selected checkpoint and quantization, then validate memory, throughput, quality, and exposure.

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Serving · Aug 2026

vLLM vs Ollama

Choose a runtime with a migration pilot measuring deployment effort, quality, latency, throughput, and operations.

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Interactive tools

Use the five model and agent tools to estimate costs, inspect vendor benchmarks, create a model shortlist, or generate an architecture blueprint.