The Agentic Crew book cover

Engineering Book

The Agentic Crew

How software engineers learn to build with agents

A practical guide to the craft of agentic engineering — context management, guardrails, multi-agent orchestration, CI/CD integration, and knowing when to put the agent away. Free, in four languages.

17chapters
4languages
Freeforever
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Who it's for

Written for working engineers

You already know how to code. You've used GitHub Copilot, maybe tried Claude or ChatGPT. But using an AI assistant and building with AI agents are different things — and that gap is what this book bridges.

Covers the practical craft: what context to give your agent, how to scope its permissions, when to run agents in parallel, how to make test suites agent-friendly, and what to do when the agent confidently does something wrong.

Context management

The single most important skill in agentic engineering — curating what your agents see.

Guardrails

Trust gradients, permission scoping, and approval gates that let agents work without breaking things.

Multi-agent workflows

Running agents in parallel, branch-per-agent isolation, and knowing when more isn't better.

CI/CD integration

PR pre-screening, overnight agents, and the trust question when nobody's watching.

Contents

17 chapters

01
Introduction The fundamental loop of software engineering is breaking.
02
Context The single most important skill in agentic engineering.
03
What Is an Agent? From autocomplete to autonomous systems.
04
Guardrails Giving agents power without giving them the keys to production.
05
Git as Agent Infrastructure Small commits, branch-per-task, and worktrees for parallel agents.
06
Sandboxes Making failure cheap and experimentation free.
07
Testing as the Feedback Loop Tests become the agent's eyes.
08
Convention Over Configuration Why consistency makes agents dramatically more effective.
09
Extending the Agent's Reach MCP, tool integrations, and connecting agents to the world.
10
Local LLMs vs. Commercial LLMs Privacy, cost, and the practical hybrid approach.
11
Prompting as Engineering Task decomposition, constraint specification, and anti-patterns.
12
Multi-Agent Orchestration Parallel agents, handover patterns, and branch isolation.
13
Agents in the Pipeline Using agents in CI/CD — and knowing when not to.
14
When Agents Get It Wrong War stories and a diagnostic playbook.
15
When Not to Use Agents The overhead tax and the craft argument.
16
Agentic Teams Shared standards, onboarding, and team-level practices.
17
What Comes Next Where the field is heading and how to keep up.

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Det Agentiske Mandskab

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Also available

Interactive presentation Not a coder? Try the Crew Member's Guide → Want exercises? Try the Hands-On Guide →