Building Agentic AI Systems with DSPy (Edition 2): A Hands-On Guide to Designing Robust AI Agents That Improve Accuracy, Lower Costs, and Scale Seamlessly
AI teams are hitting the same wall: agents that work in prototypes but collapse in real workloads. Prompts become brittle. Reasoning falls apart under pressure. Tool calls break without warning. Costs surge as systems scale. If you've struggled to build dependable, controllable agents, you're not alone.Building Agentic AI Systems with DSPy (Edition 2) shows a different path, one grounded in engineering discipline rather than prompt guesswork. DSPy replaces ad-hoc prompting with signatures, modules, and compilers that systematically improve accuracy, reduce token usage, and keep agent behavior stable even as models evolve. This hands-on guide walks you through building structured, testable, multi-step AI systems that retrieve facts, call tools, plan actions, evaluate themselves, and operate reliably in production.
You'll see how DSPy transforms agent development from unpredictable magic into a measurable, iterative workflow. Instead of asking, "Why did the model do that?", you'll know where decisions come from, how to trace failures, and how to optimize reasoning with real metrics. Whether you're building RAG systems, planning agents, customer support workflows, or autonomous tool users, this book shows the exact patterns that make agentic systems durable, scalable, and cost-efficient.
You will learn how to:
- Design structured agents using signatures that define clear, deterministic behavior.
- Build retrieval-augmented pipelines that stay grounded and avoid hallucinations.
- Implement robust tool-using agents with ReAct, reasoning loops, and controlled execution.
- Apply compilers that automatically improve prompts, reasoning steps, and model outputs.
- Build multi-agent systems with well-defined roles, intermediate outputs, and coordinator logic.
- Add memory, state, and long-running task support for complex workloads.
- Trace, debug, and monitor agents using real telemetry and evaluation metrics.
- Deploy DSPy agents as scalable APIs, workers, and background processes while controlling cost.
Every chapter builds toward real, production-ready systems, complete with patterns, workflows, and tactics used by teams shipping AI features today. If you want agents that improve over time instead of drifting, and pipelines that scale without exploding in cost, this book gives you the foundation and tools to make it happen.
If you're ready to build AI systems that behave reliably, reason clearly, and operate like software instead of experiments, start reading and take control of your agent stack today