By Louis-Francois Bouchard (X, YouTube, other AI resources)
Goal: give you decision-ready references for the most common AI engineering problems. Open a cheatsheet, find your situation in the table, and follow the recommendation.
Model and tool preferences are snapshots: August 2026 for the playbook and agent guide, October 2026 for the Anti-Slop guide. Treat them as tested starting points, then validate them on your own workload.
New book: AI Engineering For Production takes these cheatsheets further, from prompting, RAG, and evaluation to reliable agents and the harnesses around them. It comes out before the end of 2026. Join the waitlist →
| Cheatsheet | What you get |
|---|---|
| AI Engineering Playbook | Pick the right AI technique, model, effort level, modality workflow, prompting strategy, RAG setup, memory pattern, eval method, and production config. |
| Agent Architecture and Operations Guide | Decide between workflow, single agent, and multi-agent, then operate it with curated context, evidence stores, phased review, portable skills, feedback loops, and safe scheduling. |
| Anti-Slop AI Writing Guide | Write with AI without sounding like AI: the six kinds of slop, what 6,750 judged drafts reveal about AI tells, rules with before/after examples, a two-generation phrase list, a copy-paste prompt, pick/review/rewrite prompts, a 60-second check, and format checks. |
- Open the cheatsheet relevant to your problem.
- Find your situation in the decision tables.
- Follow the recommended approach.
For the Anti-Slop guide, assemble the sources first, fill in the prompt template, generate a few drafts, pick the best, run the separate evidence-first review, rewrite once, and finish with the 60-second check.
These cheatsheets come from the Towards AI courses. They cover the same frameworks in more depth, with full lessons, code, and hands-on projects.
- AI Engineering For Production - Our new book on making LLMs and agents reliable with prompting, RAG, evaluation, and harnesses. Coming before the end of 2026; join the waitlist to hear the date first.
- Full Stack AI Engineering - Prompting to production-grade RAG system. Position yourself for the roles, projects, and opportunities that AI is creating right now.
- AI for Business Professionals - Learn to get real benefits from LLMs for valuable tasks from experts that build AI for a living.
- Agentic AI Engineering - Your Path to Agentic AI for Production.
- Free Agents Webinar - Workflows vs. agents deep-dive (YouTube).