Reading academic papers is one of the best ways to extend your engineering knowledge.
There's abundant cool research being put out by universities and research labs. Combining this with the iconic ("historic") papers from the past 50 years lets you go DEEP.
If you want to become an expert on something, do a weekly / monthly paper read.
a professor at Illinois got frustrated with existing systems programming textbooks
so he started a wikibook project and had students help write it
it covers C, processes, threads, synchronization, memory allocation, networking, filesystems, scheduling and security
all in one free PDF
it eventually became the official textbook for CS 241 at UIUC with more than 1000 students taking the course every year
written for people who already know how to code and want to understand what actually happens underneath
As an AI Engineer shipping agents to production, please learn:
- Not every intent needs an agent
- Early stopping over indefinite retries
- Fallback parsers for structured output
- Evals for agent behavior not just output
- Delivery infra that's framework-agnostic
- Provider diversity as a reliability decision
- Model portfolios over single-model stacks
- One agent with good tools over multi-agent
- Cost attribution per feature, not per invoice
- Full-chain tracing, not just endpoint logging
- Deterministic signals before LLM-as-a-judge
- Production traffic repeats. Cache accordingly
- Guardrails as middleware, not per-agent code
- Human-in-the-loop is a design pattern, not a fallback
Most of what blocks agents from going to production isn't the core logic.
It's the plumbing around it. That's why most points above focus on agent ops, not just agent dev.
Plano is a 100% open-source infrastructure layer that handles routing, orchestration, guardrails, and observability for agentic apps.
I have shared the GitHub repo in the replies.
๐ Over to you: What else would you add here?
PayPal mafia had its run. OpenAI is starting to look like the next one Elon left, Karpathy moved on, Dario Amodei is building Anthropic, and Mira Murati is building Thinking Machines.
The company may be the lab, but the people become the ecosystem.