Building Intelligent Agents: Skills, Automation, and Token Economics

The romantic phase of generative AI is over. Writing a long prompt and hoping for the best was never a strategy, and in production it fails in ways that are expensive and hard to see. Agents loop against impossible problems until someone notices the invoice. Conversation histories grow until cost curves bend quadratically. Models read forty thousand tokens, miss the clause that mattered on page thirty-eight, and return a confident, well-formatted, incorrect answer that looks exactly like a correct one. Building Intelligent Agents is a software engineering treatise for the teams who have to make these systems work. Its thesis is that autonomous AI deserves the same rigor, determinism, and financial discipline as any other mission-critical architecture, and that the hard part is not the model. It is everything you build around it.