CHAPTER 18 · Reference Architecture and a Design Checklist · 2 / 15
How the chapters map onto it
- API tier: security & multi-tenancy (Ch 11), reliability at the edges (Ch 13), scaling/statelessness (Ch 16).
- Agent core: the loop (Ch 2), context engineering (Ch 5), prompt architecture (Ch 6), streaming/events (Ch 8).
- Provider layer: abstraction & tiering (Ch 4), cost/latency (Ch 14).
- Tools: tool design (Ch 3), retrieval strategy (Ch 7), integrations (Ch 7, 17).
- Document pipeline: file processing (Ch 10).
- Data tier: data modeling (Ch 9), storage & downloads.
- Cross-cutting: secrets/BYOK (Ch 12), observability/eval (Ch 15), domain/compliance (Ch 17), anatomy & vocabulary (Ch 1).