By Pranav Belhekar · Volume 1 out now
Atlas
The AI engineer's field guide. Production patterns for RAG, memory, and agentic systems.
Atlas is the book I wish I'd had when I started shipping agentic systems into production. It's not a survey of the field — it's a working guide, written from the inside of systems that have actually run, broken, and been put back together. Volume 1 covers the first four chapters; Volume 2 is in progress.
Volume 1 · out now
4 chapters
- 01
Foundations: when an LLM is the right tool
When to reach for a model, when to reach for a rule. Cost and latency budgets before you write a prompt.
- 02
Retrieval that doesn't lie
Why naive top-k breaks in week three. Chunking strategies that survive a real corpus. Honest evals.
- 03
Tool use and the contract problem
How agents fail when tool descriptions drift from tool behavior. Patterns for keeping them in sync.
- 04
Production memory systems
Short-term, long-term, and the awkward layer between them. What survives a context-window reset.
Volume 2 · in progress
4 chapters
- 05
Multi-agent orchestration without deadlocks
in progressSupervisor patterns, message bus designs, the failure modes that only show up under load.
- 06
Evals that actually catch regressions
Why your golden set isn't enough. Adversarial sets, drift detection, when to ship anyway.
- 07
Cost, latency, and the boring trade-offs
Caching, batching, model selection. The unsexy work that decides whether the system survives Q2.
- 08
Observability for agentic systems
Tracing across tools and models. Knowing when production is misbehaving before a user tells you.
This is for you if
- You're shipping an LLM-backed product and the demo-vs-prod gap is hurting.
- You can read TypeScript or Python and want code, not analogies.
- You've already tried "just use LangChain" and it didn't end where you hoped.
- You care about evals, latency budgets, and cost — not just clever prompts.
It's not for you if
- You're looking for an intro to what an LLM is.
- You want vendor comparisons or "best model for X" leaderboards.
- You want hype, predictions, or anything about AGI timelines.
- You expected no code.
Get the book
Digital · Gumroad
Atlas — Volume 1
- All four Volume 1 chapters
- PDF + web reader
- Free updates within Volume 1
Print · Amazon
Atlas — Volume 1, paperback
- Same content, in print
- Ships globally via Amazon
- For the people who still annotate in pen
Volume 2 ships chapter-by-chapter. Subscribe to the field notes below and I'll send you a note when each chapter lands.
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Start with Volume 1
Four chapters of working patterns from production agentic systems. Digital, paperback, or both.