Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reliable by Design: Engineering AI Systems That Hold

Reliable by Design: Engineering AI Systems That Hold

Riker, Howard

Paperback

Programming

ISBN13: 9798195717490
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 5 2026
Pages: 298
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.62 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Software engineers have been shipping AI features for years. Too many of them are held together by prompt strings.

The problem is not the models. The models are extraordinary. The problem is the layer between the model and production: the code that calls it, validates its output, handles its failures, controls its cost, and keeps it from doing something catastrophic on a Saturday night.

That layer is where this book lives.

Reliable by Design is a production engineering curriculum for software engineers who are done with demos. It covers the full stack of concerns that appear the moment a model hits production: type-safe output handling, retrieval architecture, eval pipelines, agent control flow, security, observability, and cost governance.

The central argument is simple: a model is a probabilistic kernel. Your software system must be the deterministic shell around it. That shell is where reliability lives, and building it well is an engineering problem, not a research problem.

This is not a book about prompting. It is not a book about which model to use. It is a book about the craft of building AI systems that survive contact with real users, real budgets, and real incidents.

Also in

Programming

View All