Part I: Foundations

The pure, durable core, read these first. What agentic engineering is, the litmus test applied to everything later, where your system sits on the workflow-to-agent spectrum, the augmented LLM as the base unit, context engineering, and the build-vs-buy question.

The running example: Listing Studio

The patterns in this reference are easier to trust when you watch them crowd into one real-shaped system, so the whole book teaches through a single fictional commerce platform, Listing Studio. Its main surface is a batch pipeline: a merchandiser uploads a supplier's spreadsheet and a folder of photos, clicks Generate listing, and roughly thirty model calls fire across nine steps to turn a raw supplier feed into a finished storefront listing.

ingest → clarify → categorize → write copy → content blocks → price → assemble launch package → brand-voice polish → publish

The same company runs a few sibling surfaces (a shopper assistant, a merchant helpdesk, a repricing agent, a category-research agent) that the reference reaches for only when a batch pipeline cannot make the point. The patterns are drawn from a real production system, recast in this commerce setting so the ideas travel without the domain baggage. How to Read This gives the full tour and the shape every chapter shares.

In this part

• 1.1 It's Still Engineering
• 1.2 Who Decides?
• 1.3 Workflow or Agent?
• 1.4 The Augmented LLM
• 1.5 Context Engineering
• 1.6 Do You Even Need a Framework?