A Systematic Approach to AI Agent Engineering

You've shipped microservices that handle millions of requests. You've designed event-driven systems that wake you up at 3am. Now your CTO is asking you to "add AI agents." This is that guide written for engineers who know what a race condition is and have opinions about retry logic. The Mental Model Shift Most AI agent frameworks are s dressed up as infrastructure. Before touching any library, internalize this: An AI agent is a control loop with a probabilistic step. That's it. The "intelligence" is just one step in a workflow usually a call to an LLM that produces a decision.