Building AI Agent Platforms

Chapter 2. What Is a Platform?

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“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.”

Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project

The previous chapter has shown that the DevOps principle You build it, you run it is as important to follow for AI applications. This means teams have to take on a lot of responsibilities, leading to a higher team cognitive load — the total mental effort required to build and run an application. Unmanaged, this cognitive load slows down value delivery.

This problem is not unique to the relatively young field of AI Engineering and has been recognised for some time in the software engineering community. To address this challenge, the term Platform Engineering has been coined to describe the idea of providing centralised services and tools, ultimately reducing the cognitive load on development teams.

This idea is not new and probably dates back to the early days of IT. But with the rise of cloud computing, DevOps practices, and the need for faster software delivery, ...