welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Designing AI Systems. To get the most benefit from this book, you’ll want to have established skills in Python programming and a basic understanding of backend system design. If you have ever experimented with LLM APIs and wondered, "How do I actually run this reliably in production?", you are in the right place.
We wrote this book because we saw too many AI projects get stuck in the "prototype trap." It is easy to write a script that calls an OpenAI API and looks impressive in a demo. It is much harder to build a system that handles multi-turn conversation state, manages token budgets, enforces safety guardrails, and routes traffic across different models cost-effectively.
We realized that while there are many resources on prompting models, there are very few on platforming them. We wanted to provide the blueprint we wish we had: a guide to building the rigorous middleware that turns raw model capabilities into enterprise-grade applications.
In this book, we move beyond the hype to focus on the engineering fundamentals. You will learn how to architect and build a complete, service-oriented AI platform from the ground up. We will cover how to decouple your applications from specific model providers, design sophisticated memory systems that persist context across sessions, and build the orchestration layer required for complex, agentic workflows.