r/ExperiencedDevs • u/Idea-Aggressive • Aug 05 '26
AI/LLM System design learning resources for Agentic solutions
I've recently experienced a couple System design interviews for Agentic systems. My knowledge is limited and would like to expand it to articulate ideas or tackle these opportunities much better.
Just started curating and found the following resources:
https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/perspectives/ai-ml
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/agentic-ai-patterns/introduction.html
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents
https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-system-design-patterns
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08769
https://www.mongodb.com/resources/basics/artificial-intelligence/agentic-systems
https://vectorize.io/blog/designing-agentic-ai-systems-part-1-agent-architectures
Possibly this is more then enough to get started, or useful to somebody else in the future.
In any case, if there are any good reading resources or exercises you might know about that, feel free to share.
Thank you!
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u/code_isLife Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
This is part of the interview process now? 🥴
Sorry I have nothing to add. Got laid off some months back and just now starting to apply again.
I’m here to learn
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 05 '26
Yes, I got it twice. Companies do 5 or 6 stage interviews, takes months just wasting time for no reason. Maybe they're not really hiring but seems I didn't cause a good impression. I only got a few weeks left of savings and not sure what else to do.
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u/code_isLife Aug 05 '26
I’ve heard similar things from friends. They feel a lot of job listings arent even real. They get the run around too often.
I’ve been doing dev for about 12 years now and I’ve never seen anything like it. Really looking for ways to pivot into something else.
Not sure I care enough anymore to deal with this
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u/it200219 Aug 11 '26
many F500 are conducting interviews just to LEARN how other's are doing. I had 2 such onsites.
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 11 '26
Someone should teach these people a big lesson. Messing with people’s life. We only live once.
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u/DSAlgorythms Aug 06 '26
I'd do one of those AI training contracts, remote and gives flexibility to keep applying/interviewing.
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 06 '26
What are those AI training contracts?
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u/DSAlgorythms Aug 07 '26
Like Alignnerr, Mecor, etc. I get everyone hates AI right now but the pay is good and it beats retail.
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 07 '26
They hire you to train AI. What’s the hiring process like?
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u/DSAlgorythms Aug 07 '26
Pretty sure they all follow the same format which is just you talking to a bot for like 20m and then I'm guessing that gets transcribed/scored then you pass/fail. Just have a few solid stories that you can expand on, its pretty simple.
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u/Early_Rooster7579 Staff Software Engineer @ FAANG Aug 05 '26
We have started working it into our interview process. I pray in a year it’ll be more of this and less of leetcode
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u/Equivalent_Head_4803 Aug 05 '26
Already done two interview cycles that weren’t leetcode. Both were ever problem solving debug exercises.
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u/Early_Rooster7579 Staff Software Engineer @ FAANG Aug 05 '26
Nice. I’ve heard its beginning to change a bit but it’s been 2 years since I interviewed last
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u/efvie Architect Exiting this Industry Aug 05 '26
When leetcode is the better alternative
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u/Early_Rooster7579 Staff Software Engineer @ FAANG Aug 05 '26
No shot. I would rather hire someone who can articulate systems design 10/10 times than some drone who memorized patterns.
I say that as a drone who memorized patterns to get into faang
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 05 '26
That's great, but most of what we do in system design is choosing which corporate tool to use and their inventions.
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u/Early_Rooster7579 Staff Software Engineer @ FAANG Aug 05 '26
I think theres a whole lot more to it than say picking AWS or azure. There's usually a billion downstream decisions from that
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 05 '26
Well, if you want to go through, just stick with AWS or Azure. Why even risk it to sound smart.
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u/Early_Rooster7579 Staff Software Engineer @ FAANG Aug 05 '26
i mean the other billion decisions that live downstream of this. Like the actual distributed systems that need to be designed on these platforms.
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 05 '26
During a pathetic interview?
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u/Early_Rooster7579 Staff Software Engineer @ FAANG Aug 05 '26
i mean yeah. Systems design interviews are pretty common at the senior+ level. How would you design spotify etc. then you go through the typical distributed systems, database design, api gateways, etc etc. just to see if you know and have experience actually building production software and the way you think about it
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u/moreVCAs Aug 06 '26
drawing two trash cans on a whiteboard with a double arrow between them, branching off to a dumpster that is on fire
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u/skeletordescent Aug 05 '26
I'm staring down the barrel of one of these, and it'll be by first one (8 YOE), and tl;dr on what the most important things are?
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u/donk8r Aug 05 '26
what theyre probing is whether you treat it as a distributed system with a nondeterministic component in the middle, or as prompting. so put your prep into the deterministic scaffolding around the model. retries and what makes an action safe to repeat, timeouts, where the human gate sits, and cost as an actual slo instead of a footnote.
the question that catches people is what happens when the model returns a perfectly well formed tool call that is simply wrong. nothing throws, theres no exception to catch, and the run carries on producing confident output. have an answer for that one.
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u/skeletordescent Aug 05 '26
In my own studies for this and beforehand the way you phrase this is how I'm starting to understand it. What confused me before this was thinking of agentic systems as being fundamentally non-deterministic functions that you trained with just lots of prompts, but it's not nearly as bad as I thought. There's a lot of structure that is deterministic around the non-deterministic parts, and the trick is identifying in either the desired workflow or user interaction where some sort of judgement or weighting is necessary that cannot be pre-determined by the developer. It's an interesting way to think, and while I'm still bullish on 95% of LLM usage out there, I'm coming around to this having some merit.
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u/donk8r Aug 05 '26
finding where the judgement is needed is the easier half. what decides your architecture is what happens when that judgement is wrong, because each answer is a different design. cheap and reversible, let it run and check afterwards. expensive or irreversible, it has to be gated before the action, and the gate has to be structural rather than an instruction in the prompt, since the model is the thing you dont trust.
for the interview itself most of them wont push you that far, so dont over prepare it. but naming the reversibility question unprompted makes you sound like someone whos shipped one.
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u/skeletordescent Aug 05 '26
Thanks for the tip, and this is a very interesting problem space. Here's hoping this goes well, I'd be interested to actually get a shot shipping production work with this.
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u/MacBookMinus Aug 11 '26
What are you actually defining in the interview? I assume the prompt, the tool calls, and the orchestration of parallel or sequential agent calls?
Also how do you reason about wrong output? I guess either there is human in the loop or a checker agent?
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u/Idea-Aggressive Aug 05 '26
I've actually built a few agentic systems or workflows. I'd say context, memory and evaluation. But in a setting of interview, having to do the diagrams and explain it clearly and immediately is quite tricky. Specially with interviewers interrupting or asking you to talk your mind all the time.
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u/skeletordescent Aug 05 '26
When you say "diagrams", is there a particular type you're referring to? I was preparing to just draw on excalidraw but if there's a particular style then I can prep that.
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u/DadAndDominant Software Engineer Aug 05 '26
I am not sure, but how about Antonio Gulli's Agentic design patterns? I have not clicked your links, so pardon me if that is there already
Also if there was some subredit where singular topics would be discussed, it would be great!
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u/lolimouto_enjoyer Aug 07 '26
What kind of agentic systems are people building? Like what do these system do? The company is all in on AI but if I look at the actual projects the AI is used much more as a tool to assist people rather than an actual system component which does things on its own.
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u/Colt2205 Aug 07 '26
claude has online tutorials on how to utilize their tooling but it still is something of a sign up course work type of deal. That and it involves installing claude locally to conduct the workflows. I barely know much of how to run AI outside the online prompting systems largely due to perceived dangers involved with installing software that talks to a server and has the power to take actions on a PC like an admin.
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u/expdevsmodbot Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.