Whitepapers and technical briefs for building agentic AI
A practitioner's reference library: how to architect autonomous agents, wire safe action layers, evaluate them, and run them in production — drawn straight from the systems we ship.
- Reference architectures
- Guardrail & eval patterns
- Governance playbooks
- Cost & latency models
Four collections in the library
Organized by where teams get stuck — from first architecture to production governance.
Agent Architecture Patterns
Single-agent, supervisor, and multi-agent topologies, with action-layer schemas and state-handling tradeoffs.
Guardrails & Safe Actions
Approval gates, risk thresholds, sandboxed tool calls, and rollback patterns for high-stakes automation.
Evaluation & Observability
Eval harness design, golden-set construction, regression gates, and tracing decisions end to end.
Governance Playbooks
Model risk policy, decision lineage, audit-readiness, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints by risk tier.
Retrieval & Grounding
RAG that survives contact with messy enterprise data — chunking, freshness, citation, and air-gapped indexes.
Production & Cost
Latency budgets, token economics, caching, fallback routing, and the ROI math behind a fleet.
Written by the people who ship the agents
Most AI whitepapers are sales decks with footnotes. Ours start as internal engineering notes — the diagram we drew before a build, the eval rubric that caught a regression, the governance policy that passed an auditor.
Each brief is reviewed by an engineer who has run the pattern in a client environment. If we haven't shipped it, we don't claim it. That's why the library reads like documentation, not marketing.
- Authored by practicing engineers
- Every pattern is production-tested
- Diagrams, schemas, and code, not buzzwords
From brief to build
The library is a starting point — here's the path most teams take through it.
Browse
Skim the technical briefs to map your problem to a known pattern and its tradeoffs.
Request
Book a short call and we'll send the deeper whitepapers matched to your stack and risk profile.
Adapt
We walk the reference architecture against your systems, perimeter, and compliance needs.
Build
Hand the marked-up brief to your team, or have us implement it end to end in your environment.
A technical brief vs. a vendor whitepaper
Why our library is built to be handed to engineers.
| A typical vendor whitepaper | An Automatic.co technical brief | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Marketing team | The engineer who shipped it |
| Diagrams | Stock illustrations | Real topology & action-layer schemas |
| Evidence | Logo wall | Eval rubrics, cost math, lineage |
| Outcome | A demo request | Something your team can actually build from |
Explore related resources
The library connects to the rest of our reference materials.
Frequently asked questions
Is the library gated?
Lightly. The technical briefs are open to read on request; the deeper whitepapers — reference architectures, eval rubrics, and the governance playbook — go out after a short call so we can point you to the ones that match your stack.
Who writes these?
The same engineers who ship the agents — Nate Nead, Samuel Edwards, Timothy Carter, and Eric Lamanna — not a marketing team. Every brief reflects a pattern we've actually run in production.
How technical are the briefs?
Technical enough to hand to your engineers. Expect topology diagrams, action-layer schemas, retry and approval logic, eval harness code, and cost math — not vendor slideware.
Can I get a brief on a topic that isn't published yet?
Often, yes. If you're weighing a specific pattern — say, multi-agent orchestration on Temporal or air-gapped RAG — book a call and we'll share working notes or write a short brief for your case.
Tell us your stack. Leave with the right briefs.
One short call and we'll send the whitepapers and reference architectures matched to your systems, perimeter, and risk profile.