Al Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models

Chip Huyen teaches at Stanford. She worked at Netflix and NVIDIA. She knows research and she knows production. This shows in her writing.

- Chip Huyen

The book has 350 pages. It focuses on one goal: moving Al from experiments to systems that work. Huyen published it in 2025. It tackles problems engineers face today.

Huyen calls Al engineering a new field. It’s not machine learning. It’s not software engineering. It combines both but creates something different.

How Al Engineering Differs

Regular software takes input A and gives output B. Every time. Al systems don't work this way. They give different outputs for the same input. A system that works 99% of the time still fails once per hundred tries.

Huyen shows how to think about systems that aren't predictable. She covers failure modes that don’t exist in regular software. She teaches design patterns for handling uncertainty.

The book gives real examples. Prompt versioning systems. Model drift detection. A/B testing for Al features. You can use these patterns in your next project.

Production Deployment