03 · 19 sources · 8 stages

Build it, govern it

The gap between a cool demo and something people can actually use is evaluation, reliability and security. Prompting matters, but it is rarely the hard part. This is the least glamorous track on the page and the one most likely to change what you do on a Tuesday.

This is where the arguing stops and the paperwork starts. Binding law with commencement dates, plus the voluntary frameworks the labs wrote about themselves and can be held to later. Read the primary documents. Almost nobody quoting the EU AI Act at you has opened it.

The gap between a demo and a product is almost entirely evaluation, reliability and security, and almost none of it is prompting. Patterns that survive contact with users, the failure mode nobody has solved, and the discipline separating teams who ship from teams who demo. If you build anything, the evals item will change how you work.

Governance is where the arguments stop being arguments and become obligations with commencement dates. The binding law, the voluntary frameworks, the technical governance literature, and the national security framing that has quietly become the most influential of the three. Read the primary instruments, not the coverage.

Choose the useful amount

Two ways through this track

Basic route 7 sources. A shorter route through the load-bearing ideas.

0 of 7 in this route

Building effective agents
Your AI product needs evals
Prompt injection
OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications
The EU AI Act
AI Risk Management Framework
Computing Power and the Governance of AI

Find a sourcePoint of view

A demo is the beginning of the test

Look for reliability, recovery, observable costs, jurisdiction and a human escape hatch. Systems and rules both become real when promises leave receipts.

How to read the cards

free some paid library card rent or stream paid

Core read first Reference look things up Risk case / Skeptical argues one side Both sides argues with itself Off axis outside the meter Fiction intuition pump Follow-up keep going

A check means encountered, not mastered. Shared sources stay checked everywhere.

Stage 00

Start with the pattern, not the mascot

Agent is now a word people throw at any loop with confidence and a logo. Read the actual pattern first: tools, state, decisions, failure, retry. The mascot costume can wait in the hallway.

Building effective agents

Core

S01 Anthropic · 2024 · Engineering guide

Distinguishes workflows, where steps are fixed in code, from agents, where the model directs its own process, and argues most production systems should be the former. The most useful correction available to anyone about to over-engineer, from the lab with every incentive to say otherwise.

What to do Read it before you write any code, and take the workflow-versus-agent distinction as a default rather than a suggestion. Try describing whatever you are about to build as a fixed workflow first. If that version works, the extra autonomy may not be earning its keep. Most of the value on this page is in that last sentence.

Two ways through this track

Start with the pattern, not the mascot

Ask the map

Evals are the product discipline

Now make peace with the attack surface

Read the law before the takes

The labs wrote promises down

The harms have receipts too

The leverage lives in boring chokepoints

The old specification failure