Protocols in Verse: An Experimental Poem-Book on Agentic AI Development
A masterclass in reliability engineering disguised as literary analysis.
Protocols in Verse is a highly experimental technical book that treats poems and songs as rigorous specifications for building reliable agentic AI systems.
In a normal technical book, metaphors are decoration. Here, the metaphors are the machinery. This book argues that the vagueness of poetry mirrors the ambiguity of real-world AI deployment-and that solving one helps solve the other. By analyzing works from W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and pop culture, it extracts the hard engineering primitives needed to move agents from "cool demo" to "production-grade system," including:
Termination & Budgets: Why "Love has no ending" is a fatal engineering flaw, and how to design stop rules that actually work.
Supervision & Watchdogs: Using "The Clocks" to implement hard constraints, TTL (Time-To-Live), and circuit breakers.
Memory & Context: Preventing context collapse by treating grounding facts like a "Village" you must return to.
Reliability & Graceful Degradation: How to design agents that break in documented ways and "grow wheat through the mud" rather than crashing silently.
This is not just a collection of poems. Each chapter includes a Poetry-to-Agent Map turning lines into design constraints, followed by technical deep dives, logic-tight arguments, and practical agent designs like "The Deadline-Keeper," "The Circuit Breaker," and "The Graceful Degrader."
Who this is for: AI Engineers, Reliability Researchers, and anyone trying to keep an LLM from destroying itself in production.
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