Elements of Agentic System Design
William C. D. Chen
Free Book
Elements of Agentic
System Design
Agent development is software engineering. The patterns you already know—state machines, information flow, feedback loops—are the patterns that work.
The mental models you use for distributed systems, queues, and workflows apply directly to building systems around language models. This book presents ten elements that form the vocabulary for designing AI applications that actually work.
What you'll learn
Primitives
Storage, retrieval, transformation, flow—the building blocks of any system
Context Engineering
Managing what the model sees and when it sees it
Feedback Loops
How agents improve their own outputs through iteration
Coordination
Multiple components working together without chaos
Complete Systems
Research pipelines, code generation, document collaboration
Chapters
Written for developers who want to understand why, not just how.