AI Agent · Field Notes

Building with Intelligent Agents

Field notes from Xinwei Xiong (cubxxw) on taking large models out of the chat box and into production systems. The work spans three directions — agent engineering, context engineering, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — all drawn from real builds, real failures, and real retrospectives.

61 articles Ongoing RSS
01 AGENT ENGINEERING

Agent Engineering

Harness design, tool orchestration, multi-agent systems — where the 98% of engineering beyond the model actually lives.

Agent Engineering column
02 CONTEXT ENGINEERING

Context Engineering

Context, memory, RAG and retrieval — what bounds an agent's intelligence isn't the model, it's what the model can see.

Start with this one
03 GEO

Generative Engine Optimization

When search shifts from giving links to giving answers, visibility is decided by the probability of being cited by AI.

GEO series

All Articles

61
  1. 31

    AI Knowledge Workflow: From Information to Records, Knowledge, and Creation

    From Information to Creation · 1/5AILLMPersonal Growth
  2. 32

    GEO Measurement in 2026: A Reproducible Citation and Referral Protocol

    Generative Engine Optimization · 6/6GEOSEOAI Search
  3. 33

    GEO Blog Rebuild Case Study: Running the Five-Layer Model on Real Data

    Generative Engine Optimization · 5/6GEOSEOAI Search
  4. 34

    Off-Site Trust for GEO: Identity, Evidence, and Ethical Distribution

    Generative Engine Optimization · 4/6GEOAI SearchContent Strategy
  5. 35

    Structured Content for GEO: A Reader-First Playbook

    Generative Engine Optimization · 3/6GEOContent StrategySEO
  6. 36

    How AI Search Retrieves and Cites Sources: A Testable GEO Model

    Generative Engine Optimization · 2/6GEORAGAI Search
  7. 37

    GEO in 2026: Evidence, Limits, and a Practical Workflow

    Generative Engine Optimization · 1/6GEOSEOAI Search
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FAQ

What is Agent Engineering?

Agent Engineering is the discipline of building production-grade AI agent systems. Model capability is only a small fraction of the work — most of the engineering lives in the harness (execution framework), tool orchestration, context management, memory systems, and evaluation. The "Agent Engineering Panorama" article in this section maps these layers systematically.

How is Context Engineering different from prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering optimizes the wording of a single instruction; context engineering manages everything the model can see across an entire session — retrieval results, memory, tool outputs, history compression. As long-running agents become the norm, context engineering is replacing prompt engineering as the new foundation of AI applications.

What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

GEO is the practice of making content easier for AI search engines like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity to retrieve and cite. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimizes for click-through ranking, GEO optimizes for the probability of being cited by AI. This section carries a six-part series covering GEO from principles and structured-content tactics to measurement tooling.

What experience is this section based on?

Everything comes from the author's (Xinwei Xiong / cubxxw) first-hand practice building AI products — open-source projects, production agent deployments, and measured data from this blog's own GEO rebuild — not second-hand summaries. Articles are organized into series; start from part one of any series.