Applied AI Engineering · Volume III
Context and Agents
Retrieval, Tools, and Autonomous Systems
Planned Chapter plan approved. Drafting begins after Volume II.
About this volume
Volume III covers the layer where most real systems are actually built: context pipelines, retrieval, tool use, and the agent control surface.
Agents are treated as an engineering problem of control and containment rather than one of capability. Hooks, skills, subagents, tool permissions, and sandboxed execution get first-class treatment.
Mission
Give a model context, tools, memory, and autonomy — safely.
Prerequisites. Volumes I and II, or equivalent. Comfortable building and testing software.
Details
| Series | Applied AI Engineering, Volume III |
|---|---|
| Author | Dr. Ahmed AlSalih |
| Publisher | Nexoma Labs LLC |
| Edition | First Edition |
| Chapters | 24 |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Formats | Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, EPUB, PDF |
| Status | Planned |
Contents
24 chapters. Chapter numbering restarts at 1 in every volume; cross-volume references are written as Volume III, Chapter 4.
- Introduction to Context Engineering
- Context Windows and Budgeting
- Context Compaction and Long-Horizon Memory
- Memory Architectures
- Embeddings and Vector Databases
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Advanced Retrieval: Hybrid Search and Reranking
- Agentic RAG and Graph-Based Retrieval
- Knowledge Curation and Ingestion Pipelines
- Tool Calling and Function Calling
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Skills and Progressive Disclosure
- Hooks: Deterministic Control of the Agent Lifecycle
- Instructions vs. Hooks vs. Skills
- Sandboxed Code Execution
- Computer Use and Browser Agents
- AI Agents
- Agent Planning
- Agent Memory
- Subagents and Agent Isolation
- Multi-Agent Systems
- Agent Communication and Interoperability
- Agent Evaluation
- Capstone Project
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