Topic
AI agents
A practical roadmap to building with AI agents, written from using them to build real systems: moving from one agent to an agentic system, giving agents knowledge and retrieval, connecting tools and integrations, setting permissions and security boundaries, and keeping the result reliable in CI. The public sessions come at the same subject for people who do not write code, from agents for township businesses to agents for online shopping.
7 writing · 3 talks and sessions · Wikidata Q132451509
Writing
- The Practical Roadmap to Building With AI Agents, Part 2: Giving an Agent HandsAn agent that can only edit files makes you the courier between it and everything else. Tools and MCP fix that. Part two of six: what a tool actually is, what I connected, what it fixed in thirty seconds, and the permissions file I am not proud of.
- The Practical Roadmap to Building With AI Agents, Part 3: Giving an Agent KnowledgeThe assistant on this site answers from my actual writing. Part three of six: RAG explained without the jargon, the chunking and search settings I actually use, and three retrieval bugs where the model was fine and the information was not.
- The Practical Roadmap to Building With AI Agents, Part 4: Making Agents Safe Enough to ActIf your agent can use tools, what stops it doing something stupid? Part four of six: why prompt instructions are not a security control, the database rules that make bad outcomes impossible on this site, and the gaps I have not closed.
- The Practical Roadmap to Building With AI Agents, Part 5: Making Agents Reliable Enough to ShipGeneration gives you code. Feedback loops turn it into engineering. Part five of six: the failures on this site where a green build was exactly the wrong goal, and how a bug becomes a permanent check nobody has to remember.
- The Practical Roadmap to Building With AI Agents, Part 6: From One Agent to an Agentic SystemLoops, subagents, orchestration and routing, explained without the hype, plus the economics nobody mentions. Part six of six: what this site actually runs, what it deliberately does not, and why more agents is often the wrong answer.
- The Practical Roadmap to Building With AI Agents, Part 1: From Chat to AgentMost people use AI like a vending machine. I used it like a senior engineer sitting next to me, and built this whole site that way without knowing Next.js. Part one of six: what actually separates a chat window from an agent, and how to start.
- The Modern Data Scientist: A Roadmap for the Age of AI AgentsThe job hasn't disappeared. The mental model has changed. Here's what the roadmap looks like for data scientists and engineers entering (or navigating) the AI agent era, with a South African lens.
Talks and sessions
Related topics
Subjects that share work with this one. Those with their own page are linked.
- Artificial intelligence
- Software engineering
- AI education
- Data science
- Retrieval augmented generation