Reading List

Curated entry points to follow the field. Organized by depth of commitment — start at the top, add lower-frequency sources as you have bandwidth. Everything here is referenced from primary sources in the Research Notes bibliography.

---

Daily firehose (skim in 5-10 min)

Source	What you get	Cadence
Simon Willison's Weblog	Hands-on LLM/agent experiments, security takes, naming-of-things — the single best daily signal	Daily, sometimes 2-3×/day
TLDR AI	5-minute consensus summary of what broke today	Daily
The Batch (DeepLearning.AI)	Andrew Ng's measured weekly digest with editorial commentary	Weekly (Wednesday)

If you only follow one of these, follow Simon Willison.

---

Weekly substantive

Source	Beat
Import AI — Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder)	Research papers + capability jumps with policy framing; signature "Tech Tales" fiction vignettes
Latent Space — swyx & Alessio Fanelli	The original "AI Engineer" beat; production patterns from labs (183K subscribers)
Hamel.dev — Hamel Husain	Eval methodology, applied AI engineering; "evals are the missing infrastructure"
Eugene Yan	Applied ML/LLM systems, reliability, "field meets frontier"
Philipp Schmid (Google DeepMind)	High-frequency tutorials: subagents, MCP, function calling, deep research

---

Deep long-form (monthly to occasional)

Source	Beat
Lil'Log — Lilian Weng	Citation-heavy primers on alignment, reasoning, training (former OpenAI safety lead)
Cameron R. Wolfe — Deep (Learning) Focus	Approachable long-form research explainers (68K subscribers)
Chip Huyen	ML/AI systems in production; author of AI Engineering (2025) — the standard reference

---

Primary sources from frontier labs

Required reading if you're serious about the field:

• Immersive Commons — The Twelve-Layer Agentic Stack (June 2026, updated monthly) — research-commons synthesis of ~1,800 recent agentic papers into a 12-layer "builder's map" of where the engineering of an autonomous agent actually lives. Names the canonical layers (Action Substrate → Pre-Action Authz), which are solved vs consolidating vs emerging, and the "Four Hard Truths." patterns.md § Twelve-Layer Agentic Stack maps each layer to the chapter that covers it on this site.
• Anthropic Engineering — the most consistently high-signal lab blog. Start with Building Effective Agents (Dec 2024) → Effective Context Engineering (Sept 2025) → Multi-Agent Research System (June 2025) → Managed Agents (Apr 2026)
• LangChain Blog — practitioner perspective on agent harnesses, evals, deep agents. Don't miss The Anatomy of an Agent Harness and Open Models Have Crossed a Threshold
• OpenAI Cookbook — first-party patterns; the cross-vendor counterpart to Anthropic Cookbook
• State of Agent Engineering 2025 (LangChain) — industry baseline: 57% have prod agents; 89% have observability; 62% have detailed tracing

---

Podcasts

Show	Hosts	Beat
Latent Space	swyx, Alessio	AI Engineer interviews — Brockman, Karpathy, Hotz, Willison
Dwarkesh Podcast	Dwarkesh Patel	Deeply researched long-form interviews with researchers, economists, historians
Practical AI	Chris Benson, Daniel Whitenack	Practical deployment, open-source angle, policy-aware
TWIML AI Podcast	Sam Charrington	Enterprise deployment + researcher interviews; running since classical-ML era

---

Courses (free, in rough order of foundation → applied)

Course	What it covers	Time
HuggingFace LLM Course	Transformers, fine-tuning, RLHF — the layer below agents	12 chapters
HuggingFace Agents Course	smolagents + LlamaIndex + LangGraph; free certification	3-4 hrs/week
LangChain Academy — Intro to LangGraph	Graph-based orchestration, state, memory, HITL, deployment	55 lessons / ~6h
Anthropic Prompt Engineering Tutorial	9 chapters of interactive Jupyter — the prompt engineering baseline	Self-paced
DeepLearning.AI Short Courses	121 short courses, partner-taught (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google)	1-2 hrs each
FreeAcademy.ai	100+ free courses with certificates; beginner-friendly	Varies

---

Communities

Community	Where	Why
Anthropic Discord	Discord	Claude / Claude Code / MCP discussion with staff presence
LangChain Discord	Discord	Largest OSS agent-framework community; maintainer presence
HuggingFace Discord	Discord	Open-source models, smolagents, HF Agents Course study groups
r/LocalLLaMA	Reddit	Largest community for self-hosted / open-weights models

---

Conferences

Event	Audience	Notable
AI Engineer	Practitioners building agents in production	Multiple events globally (SF, NYC, London); 6K+ attendees; huge free YouTube archive

The YouTube talk archive is the deliverable — even if you never attend, watch the talks.

---

YouTube channels

Channel	Beat
Andrej Karpathy	"From scratch" deep dives — building GPT, tokenizers, the whole stack
Anthropic	First-party demos, paper walkthroughs, Claude Code patterns
LangChain	Framework tutorials, case studies, agent patterns
AI Engineer (conference)	The full conference talk archive
Yannic Kilcher	Paper explainers — heavier on the ML research side
Lex Fridman	Long-form interviews; less agent-focused but high-profile guests

---

Reference repos worth keeping bookmarked

Repo	Why
anthropics/anthropic-cookbook	First-party recipes — tools, RAG, sub-agents, caching, evals (43.8K stars)
openai/openai-cookbook	OpenAI's counterpart (73.8K stars)
langchain-ai/deepagents	The reference deep-agent harness (23.3K stars)
langchain-ai/langgraph — examples dir	Pattern catalog: ReAct, ReWOO, LATS, Reflexion, plan-execute
UKGovernmentBEIS/inspect_evals	200+ pre-built evals on Inspect AI
shanraisshan/claude-code-best-practice	Most-starred Claude Code reference repo (54.7K stars); 83 categorized tips
affaan-m/ECC	60 subagents + 232 skills, cross-harness (191K stars, hackathon winner)
sierra-research/tau2-bench	Standard customer-service agent benchmark
EthicalML/awesome-agentic-engineering-resources	Curated index of 21 topics — courses, papers, benchmarks, implementations

---

Agent security & authorization

The under-covered "what can go wrong" side of agent design. Required if you're shipping anything that touches private data or external tools. See patterns.md § Adversarial Surface and § Pre-Action Authorization for the architectural callouts that draw on these.

Source	What you get
The Lethal Trifecta — Simon Willison	The canonical short framing: private data + untrusted content + external comms = exfiltration risk. Read this first.
Agents Rule of Two — Meta AI	The design-time mitigation: never let one agent session have all three trifecta properties
OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications (2026)	Industry-standard agent-specific risk taxonomy (Dec 2025); the canonical names to map controls against
MITRE ATLAS	Living TTP knowledge base for AI/ML adversaries, modeled on ATT&CK; pairs with OWASP as risks-vs-tactics
Defense in Depth for Autonomous AI Agents — Microsoft Security	Layered-defense reference + four application-layer design patterns (agents-as-microservices, least permissions, deterministic HITL, agent identity)
Google's Approach to AI Agent Security — via Willison	Three core principles: well-defined human controllers, limited powers, observable actions
Before the Tool Call: Deterministic Pre-Action Authorization — Uchibeke (arXiv 2603.20953)	Concrete pre-action gating with measured numbers: 53ms median latency, 74.6%→0% attack success delta
Layered Attack Surface Framework — Chu (arXiv 2604.23338)	Academic survey of 116 papers; 7-layer taxonomy plus temporality dimension for mapping attacks/defenses

For Claude Code's specific take on classifier-mediated autonomy, see Anthropic's Auto Mode post and Sandboxing Claude Code (both already digested in Research Notes § 1).

---

Newsletters bundle

• Ben's Bites — high-volume signal layer for what builders are trying
• AI Engineer Pack — bundle of 60+ AI dev tool credits/discounts (free with GitHub login)

---

Books

Book	Author	Why
AI Engineering (2025)	Chip Huyen	The standard reference for the production layer wrapping any agent — "the most read book on the O'Reilly platform since its launch"
Designing Machine Learning Systems	Chip Huyen	Foundation for the systems thinking that AI Engineering builds on
Building LLMs for Production	Louis-François Bouchard, Louie Peters	Practitioner deep dive — production patterns, evals, fine-tuning

---

How to actually use this

A reasonable weekly cadence for someone shipping agents in production:

Day	What
Mon	Import AI (research/policy roundup)
Tue	LangChain blog catch-up (if anything new)
Wed	The Batch (industry digest)
Daily	Simon Willison (skim)
Monthly	One Lilian Weng or Cameron Wolfe long-form
Quarterly	Re-read one Anthropic Engineering classic; spot-check your model + tool choices against current state

---

Related

• Who's Who — the people behind many of these sources, with profiles
• Schools — the broader intellectual lineages this reading list draws from
• Research Notes — primary-source bibliography with key claims pulled per URL