New AI Direction for Crafting Platforms
Why I'm building a dual product: a book for humans and a codebase for AI agents
If things have been quiet here lately, it wasn’t because I abandoned the project.
Over the last few months, I’ve been balancing my professional life with a degree in physics. It’s been intense, but I’ve kept working on Crafting Platforms at a slow and steady pace. The vision hasn’t changed, but the world around us certainly has.
I am back now, more active than ever, and I have decided to shift direction for how I write this book and who the code is for.
I’ve decided to rely heavily on AI throughout the entire lifecycle of Crafting Platforms: research, writing, review, editing, translation, and publishing. This doesn’t mean the writing is unattended. The ideas, the hard-earned lessons, and the platform engineering experience are entirely my own.
I’ve spent time extracting my voice and writing extensive reference materials to ensure consistency. The AI is an accelerator, not an author. To be completely transparent, I will share the process and code I use for this AI-assisted workflow. If you are interested in how the sausage is made—and how I ensure the materials remain legit—I’ll be opening that up soon.
This shift extends to the source code itself. Crafting Platforms is no longer just a book. It is a product with two distinct audiences.
The book is for humans. The repository is for AI agents.
Instead of providing brittle, vendor-specific Terraform templates that would be outdated the moment they were published, I am building a set of skills, agents, and commands in our repository: github.com/craftingplatforms/ai.
These artifacts teach AI agents the underlying principles of platform craftsmanship, allowing them to build solutions tailored to your unique environment. People and machines consume information in different ways, and we are finally designing for both.
This is just the beginning. I have been working in the background to bring you more content faster, and next week, there are two big releases:
1. The Online Edition: I will be launching the online version of the book, which will be updated regularly as new material is ready.
2. New Chapters: I am releasing Chapter 3 (Segmentation) and Chapter 5 (Infrastructure). There will be a new Chapter 4 (Identity and Access Management), still in draft.
This brings us to a significant milestone: 5 chapters in total (excluding the preface) and more than 100 pages of content. Not bad, right? That’s about 50% of the book.
We are moving from writing boilerplate configuration to defining strategic guidance. The book teaches you—the human—the principles of platform craftsmanship. The accompanying AI artifacts teach your agents how to implement those patterns efficiently.
I believe this dual approach is the future of technical books. On one side, I’ll teach humans how to think about platforms. On the other hand, I’ll teach machines how to build them. It’s funny because it will be like having a virtual me as your platform consultant available 24/7.
That’s all for now.