The 7 Skills You Need to Build AI Agents

Building AI agents that work in production requires far more than prompt engineering. Seven core skills are outlined: system design (architecting multi-component agent pipelines), tool and contract design (strict schemas to prevent LLM hallucination), retrieval engineering (chunking, embeddings, and re-ranking for RAG), reliability engineering (retries, timeouts, circuit breakers), security and safety (prompt injection defenses, permission boundaries), evaluation and observability (tracing, metrics, regression tests), and product thinking (UX for unpredictable systems). The piece argues that the role of 'prompt engineer' is evolving into 'agent engineer' and provides two concrete starting actions: audit tool schemas for clarity and trace one real failure back to its root cause.