Why we’re taking more time with the book

More on agents, evaluations, coding workflows, and guidance we think AI engineers will need most in 2026.

A quick update on our upcoming book, AI Engineering for Production.

TL;DR: If you missed our first announcement, this is the book we have been working on as the 2026 follow-up to Building LLMs for Production. It is about what it takes to build LLM and agent systems that actually work in production, especially now that models are becoming significantly more capable and, at the same time, just one component of a reliable system.

We first announced the book for October 20. But realized it needed more work to become the book we actually want to hand you. In this final push, we want to focus on adding as much practical, production-ready information on agents, evaluations, and the engineering ecosystem as we can.

We don’t have a date yet, but it is definitely coming by the end of the year.

Want to know the moment it’s out? Get book updates → louisbouchard.ai/book

Here’s what we’ve been working on so far:

1. An entirely new chapter on coding with AI. Although this is a book about AI engineering, very few developers in 2026 are writing all their code themselves. So we are adding our best practices, strict boundaries, and the standards we use in enterprise work to show how to use coding agents reliably.

2. An AI tutor made specifically for the book. It runs as an MCP server that you can plug into your own agent to debug and better understand every topic. We will also show you how to build one yourself and deploy it at scale in the book.

3. Coding sections rewritten to go beyond implementation details. We are adding more insight into the decisions behind the code, rather than only explaining how to implement it. We are also doing our best to make it fun to read.

4. A new conclusion focused on guardrails when building with AI. Given where the field is heading, our bet is that this will become one of the most important things to get right. So we are adding much more on this, while bringing in Louie’s enterprise experience to explain how teams can plan for changes in the industry.

We are quite excited to share the book with you. And while we are adding everything we can to make it as useful as possible, if there are any questions you want answered, or there’s ONE THING the book needs to cover for you to make it worthwhile, sign up for book updates and reply to one of those emails.

Louis-François & Louie