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When I was contacted by Sam Bhagwat’s team with them wanting to send me a few copies of his recent book Principles of Building AI Agents, I was excited to dig through what Sam was putting forth as principles of building AI agents as well as to share the extra copies with my community. I successfully gave away the extra copies I received (thank you to those that participated in my giveaway). I also have finished reading Sam’s book so as I promised I am circling back with my thoughts. In no particular order of sentiment, here are my thoughts.
First off, I like the no fluff, ‘get started quickly’ style of the book – There is already so much info online which will go stale quickly in this space so it was good to get quickly to core concepts which are less likely to change as quickly. It’s a plus having bare-bone definitions on the breadth & leaving it to the reader to take it from there in terms of the level of depth they need.
Next thing that jumped out to be here is that is a unique way to drive developer adoption of Mantra Framework while shedding light on concepts, approaches, best practices in building agents and I appreciate that. Nice addition as well having code snippets to get readers started. The investment in building a community around this framework is a strong signal that Mantra is working to be here for the long run not just a trendy framework. It made me interested in building with this framework.
In my opinion there should be more transparency around this being Mantra centred either in title or messaging. For example the title could be “Principles of building AI Agents using Mantra.”
Also, as this is a book, I think having a ‘Table of Contents’ is a non-negotiable and I was disappointed to see it missing. I would love to see this in future editions.
Finally, I do love the size of the book, the intentionality to make a book that fits in my pocket or small bag made it easy to carry and read as I had time throughout my day.
All in all, Principles of Building AI Agents by Sam Bhagwat is a respectable contribution and worth a read.