I may have missed last week. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it also gave me a chance to do something I don't do nearly enough anymore: close the laptop and pick up some actual, physical books.
So this week we have a summer reading list. A few books (and one video, I’m a slow reader…) worth your time when you finally decide the notifications can wait. Ironically, most of them are about AI, so I'm not fully off the grid. Baby steps.
📺 Watch
I Built an LLM From Scratch
Syntax
Okay, this one is on a screen, I know (you could read the transcript if that’s your thing). But this is a great explainer on what goes into building an LLM and really shines a light on the inner workings of your favorite chat bot. This is as close to a page turner as you’re going to get for a deep dive into the history and how-to for building an LLM. I’m a big proponent of understanding the underlying tech you’re working with to get the most out of it.
Not to leave you empty-handed for a reading list, 🧾 Attention Is All You Need, is the 11-page paper behind our current tech landscape.
📖 Read
Principles + Patterns of Building AI Agents
Sam Bhagwat - Mastra CEO
Two free books from Sam Bhagwat and the Mastra team, and you want both. 📖 Principles of Building AI Agents covers the fundamentals of building agents and you can easily take it down in a weekend. It has examples using Mastra’s agent building TypeScript platform (which I missed in The Summer of Agents), but the principles cross any platform. It’s a useful tool for non-developers too.
📖 Patterns of Building AI Agents picks up where it leaves off and gets practical about moving agents from prototype to production: context engineering, eval workflows, human-in-the-loop, and the security patterns nobody thinks about until something leaks. You can get them both for the price of your email. They’ll even ship you hard copies in a matter of days. There’s something nice about having an in-hand book.
📖 Read
The AI-Driven Leader
Geoff Woods
Geoff Woods makes the case for treating AI as a thought partner rather than a thought leader, which regular readers have probably caught me saying before. It's aimed at leaders and decision-makers, so it's less about building and more about how you actually change the way you work. The core idea of using AI to collapse the time between data and decision, not to outsource the decision, is sound. Though the book can be a bit of a sales pitch for their enterprise coaching services.
📖 Read
AI for Good
Josh Tyrangiel
This is next up on my reading list. Hopefully as a palate cleanser from the build-it-yourself stuff. Tyrangiel's book is about real people using AI to fix things that actually matter. A nice change of pace from the “AI is going to replace us all” doomers. Though there could be a bit of that too.
📖 Read
The River of Doubt
Candice Millard
What better time to read about Teddy Roosevelt fighting through hardships and near-death exploring the frontier of the inner Amazon. Just kidding. This was just a solid book I finished recently. It was a strange dichotomy to close the book as their expedition barely escaped with their lives, then look up the Rio Roosevelt on Google Maps and see people posting about it being a nice fishing spot… 5 stars.
Thanks for reading. Now go read something else.
Jason
