Autonomous agents can take actions that are hard or impossible to reverse. The engineering principle of blast radius control — limiting what can go wrong when an agent makes a mistake — and the specific patterns that implement it.

Prompt injection is the attack surface that didn't exist before LLM-based agents. An agent that reads external content — web pages, emails, documents, database records — can be manipulated by that content. The attack taxonomy and the defences that actually work.

The Cloud Security Alliance found security flaws in 62% of AI-generated code samples they tested. What types of flaws, why AI generates them, and the review and tooling practices that catch them before they reach production.

Single tool calls are easy. Production agents orchestrate dozens of tools across parallel branches, handle failures gracefully, version tool interfaces, and manage cost across thousands of calls per session. The patterns that make tool use reliable at scale.

Long-term memory is what separates agents that get smarter over time from agents that start from scratch on every session. The four memory patterns, how to implement each, and the engineering decisions that make agent memory practical.

The 2026 pattern for cost-efficient production agents: small language models handle simple tasks cheaply, large models handle complex tasks well. How to design the routing layer, what to measure, and what the cost-quality tradeoffs actually look like.

Reasoning models think before responding — generating extended chain-of-thought that improves accuracy on hard problems at the cost of latency and tokens. When the thinking investment pays off, and when it doesn't.

Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.4 can control computers — take screenshots, click buttons, fill forms, navigate applications. Computer use agents open use cases that tool-calling can't reach. The capabilities, the risks, and where they actually fit.

Stateless agents are easy to build and fragile in production. Long-running tasks, multi-turn conversations, and recovery from failures all require explicit state management. The patterns that make agents durable.

Most RAG systems are deployed without a proper evaluation framework. Teams discover quality problems from user complaints rather than metrics. The evaluation metrics, frameworks, and test set design that make RAG quality measurable.