Context Engineering

GPT-6 Astra changes the way prompting works. This practical guide explains what makes it different, why old techniques can fail and how to write prompts that deliver reliable results. Learn how to build, refine and troubleshoot prompts while finding the right balance between control and autonomy.

Stop asking one giant prompt to carry your whole software system. Context Driven Development teaches you how to give AI coding agents explicit requirements, architecture decisions, constraints, tasks, and verification loops so they can work inside a reliable engineering environment.

Agentic AI is everywhere, but what does it actually mean? This book cuts through the hype and explains how AI agents work, how they are built and where they can go wrong. Starting from the basics, it gives you a clear, practical understanding of the technology and what it takes to trust an agent in the real world.

Stop guessing at prompts. This visual workbook gives you 50 ready-to-run workflows, command cheatsheets, and debugging checklists for Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot — so you can open any page and immediately know what to type.

AI can sound certain even when it is completely wrong. This book takes a practical approach to building RAG systems and AI agents that ground answers in evidence, verify what they generate and know when to stop. Learn how to make AI more reliable in the places where getting it wrong really matters.

Your AI assistant forgets you every time the session ends. Building Persistent AI shows you how to fix that — by moving memory, personality, and identity out of the model and into a file you own and control.

Unlock the full potential of Claude Fable 5.1 with practical prompting techniques built for real-world work. Learn how to get better results from coding, research and complex workflows, avoid common mistakes and build reliable AI systems with proven strategies and ready-to-use prompts.

Reverse engineering gets a powerful upgrade with Claude Code. Learn how to investigate, understand and reconstruct software you’re authorized to analyze, while keeping evidence, accuracy and reproducibility at the center. From legacy systems to modern codebases, this book turns AI into a practical partner for serious software analysis.

The first thing many people hit with an AI coding assistant is a plateau. A correction made on Monday is gone by Thursday. This book is about the operating model above the prompt, where truth lives, how a correction becomes a standing rule that holds, and which judgments stay in human hands.

Prompt engineering got you a demo; context engineering ships it. This hands-on book teaches you to decide what goes into the model's context window — retrieval, memory, assembly, compression, caching — by building ctxkit, a real Python context engine, one chapter at a time.

Most vector search books start with the database. This one starts with the machine. Build a search engine from scratch, then push it from brute force to billion-scale retrieval with SIMD, HNSW, quantization and distributed systems. By the end, vector search won't be a black box. It'll be something you know how to build, tune and scale.

AI agents don’t fail because they forget everything. They fail because they remember badly. This book shows you how to engineer memory that stays accurate, efficient and useful over time. From SQLite and PostgreSQL to vector indexes and multi-agent systems, you’ll learn what it takes to build agents that can run for days without losing the plot.

Turn a small language model into an AI agent that runs on your own hardware. This practical guide takes you from choosing a base model to fine-tuning, tool use, evaluation and deployment. With reproducible code and real configurations throughout, you'll learn how to build specialized local agents that are capable, efficient and truly yours.

Specification Engineering turns complex ideas into clear, workable specifications. This practical guide takes you from core principles to advanced methods for defining, validating, managing and evolving requirements across products, software, systems and services. Built for real-world use, it gives you the tools to create specifications that people can understand and act on.

ChatGPT can save you time, sharpen your ideas and change the way you work, but only if you know how to use it well. This practical guide takes you from your first prompt to advanced techniques, with real-world examples for writing, research, coding, business and creativity. Learn what works, what doesn’t and how to get better results every day.