Inside The AI Stack

Pillar

AI Engineering

How AI applications are actually built and run: retrieval architecture, agent orchestration, tool calling, structured outputs, evaluation, and the observability required to keep any of it trustworthy under load.

What this section covers

Consolidated guides rather than a page per concept. Each area below is one resource, or will be, rather than a cluster of near-duplicates.

Application architecture

How the pieces assemble: request path, retrieval, model call, tool execution, and where to put boundaries so failures stay contained instead of cascading.

Retrieval and context

Chunking, embeddings, ranking, and context budgets — the layer where most "the model got it wrong" bugs actually live.

Agents and tool calling

Loop control, iteration limits, cost budgets, and treating the tool boundary as a real authorisation boundary rather than a polite prompt instruction.

Evaluation and observability

Measuring non-deterministic systems: graded suites, tracing across spans, cost attribution, and catching a regression before a user reports it.

Resources

Resources in this pillar

Every resource states its author, its review status, and whether the procedures in it were executed or only reviewed.

AI Agents in Production

What changes when an agent loop moves from a demo to production: hard limits, tool authorisation, failure handling, and knowing when an agent is the wrong shape entirely.

intermediate· 4 minLLMAgents

Production AI Application Architecture

How to structure an AI application so that a slow model, a failed tool call, or a bad retrieval degrades one part of the system instead of the whole request path.

intermediate· 6 minLLMRAG

RAG Architecture Guide

A working guide to retrieval-augmented generation: how to chunk, how to evaluate retrieval separately from generation, and how to diagnose a bad answer in the right order.

intermediate· 5 minRAGEmbeddings

The AI Stack Explained

A layer-by-layer map of the modern AI stack, what each layer is actually responsible for, and where production systems tend to break in practice.

foundational· 8 minLLMKubernetes

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