The Agent Loop: How AI Agents Think, Act, and Use Tools — An Engineering Interview Guide

I wrote it because I couldn't find it. Most AI interview prep teaches youprompts, and interviews don't ask about prompts. They ask how you think aboutsystems: How does an agent actually work? What are the failure modes? Why onedesign over another? Tradeoffs. Memory. Tool contracts. Evaluation. Cost. Thethings a senior engineer is supposed to know.The Agent Loop teaches agents the way interviewers probe them. Conceptsfirst. Then system design. Then tradeoffs. It is not a tutorial, and there areno API walkthroughs waiting to go stale. Every chapter opens with a 30-secondanswer you can say out loud, explains the mechanism, and closes with drills andfollow-up questions to practice under pressure.The book runs 17 chapters in three parts:- Part I, Foundations: what the interview actually scores, machine learning in one chapter, prompting and context engineering.- Part II, The agent itself: what an agent is, how an LLM thinks, tool use, memory and RAG, planning and reasoning, multi-agent systems, evaluation and observability, and the system-design drill.- Part III, Production: fine-tuning, model selection and cost, caching, observability, safety and guardrails, deployment and operations.Each chapter has a 30-second answer, points to keep, a worked example, interviewdrills, common follow-up questions, and its own sources.About the trust part: every number, quote, and claim was checked against itscited source, 77+ URLs in all, and dead links were removed before publication.The text is written in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, a controlledvocabulary built so that readers with basic English read without friction.If you're a software engineer interviewing for an AI or LLM role, this book isaimed at you. Same if someone told you to build an agent and you're not surewhere to start. It assumes you can code. It doesn't assume you know machinelearning.You get the PDF, EPUB, and Kindle files, so it reads on whatever you carry. Youget free updates for life: the book is versioned, and each revision lands inyour Gumroad library automatically. And you get a 30-day money-back guarantee,no questions asked.Jesus Mendoza is a software engineer. This book started as his own interviewprep: the notes he wanted to have, expanded, researched, and rewritten untilthey read like a book.FAQ- What formats? PDF, EPUB (Apple Books, Kobo), and Kindle (AZW3/MOBI).- Do I get updates? Yes, free and automatic, via Gumroad.- Is it for beginners? It assumes you are a working software engineer, not that you know machine learning.- What about refunds? 30 days, no questions asked, through Gumroad.Get the book. Start with the 30-second answer in Chapter 1.

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