Rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) have made new kinds of AI applications, known as agents, possible. Written by a veteran of web development, Principles of Building AI Agents focuses on the substance without hype or buzzwords. This book walks through: The key building blocks of agents: providers, models, prompts, tools, memory How to break down complex tasks with agentic workflows Giving agents access to knowledge bases with RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) Agent observability with tracing and evals