Designing with AI

The Arc of Agent Action from Code to Tools and Back to Code - And Why Anthropic's SKILLS.md is Not New

Issue #55 | Early agents (LIDA, AutoGen) supported actions via code. Then the industry moved to action via tools/structured output. And now we are back…

Jan 5 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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December 2025

Vibe Coding .. With Engineering Discipline: Building Real Apps with AI Agents

#54 | Five practices to make your AI-assisted coding more production-ready

Dec 19, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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Agent Middleware: Adding Control and Observability to AI Agents

Issue #53 | How to intercept agent operations for logging, safety, rate limiting, and compliance - the middleware pattern for production AI agents.

Dec 16, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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The Agent Execution Loop: How to Build an AI Agent From Scratch

Issue #52 | How AI agents work under the hood - the execution loop that enables reasoning, tool calling, and iterative problem solving.

Dec 11, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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Manning Cancelled My Book — Here's What Happened Next

Issue #51 | Sometimes the arrangement is the problem

Dec 8, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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Top Books on AI Agents in 2025

Issue #50 | A list of books I'd recommend to folks interested in understanding and building AI and Agents

Dec 2, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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November 2025

Two Years, 15 Chapters: The Multi-Agent Systems Book Is Finally Here!

Issue #49 | It took only 2 years-ish, but I finished writing the multi-agent systems book and it is now available!

Nov 14, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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October 2025

/upgrade ... or ...

Issue #48 | somber reflections on how AI coding tools are changing developer behavior, cognition, and dependency (the slope we are all sliding down)

Oct 27, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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Building with Agent Framework - Day 1: Block, Transform, and Control Agent Behavior with Middleware

#47 | Add reusable validation, security, and logging without touching your core agent logic

Oct 6, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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Introducing Microsoft Agent Framework (Semantic Kernel + AutoGen)

#46 | If Semantic Kernel and AutoGen joined forces …

Oct 1, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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August 2025

MCP For Software Engineers | Part 2: Interactive & Long-Running Tools (Progress streaming, User Input, Cancellation), Resources & Prompts

#45 | A deep dive into implementing Tools, Resources, Prompts, Roots in the MCP

Aug 1, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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July 2025

MCP For Software Engineers | Part 1 : Building Your First Server

#44 | New to MCP? Heres how to build your first MCP server and a Host Application that integrates and uses the server.

Jul 2, 2025 • Victor Dibia, PhD

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