Stop guessing. Start engineering. The Fundamentals of AI: From First Principles to the Perfect Prompt is a practical guide to making AI outputs reliable in real work—not just impressive in demos. You’ll learn how language models actually behave, why they hallucinate, and how to design prompts and AI agents with clear intent, controlled inputs, and testable outputs. Written for software professionals, architects, developers, and technical leaders, this book treats prompting like engineering. You’ll build five reusable design artifacts—Intent Spec, Agent Blueprint, Context Plan, Evaluation Pack, and Safety Pack—that turn a clever prompt into a system you can ship, monitor, and improve with confidence. If you want AI that’s consistent, grounded, and production-ready, this book shows you how.