The Art of Agents: Sun Tzu's Principles for Building Agentic AI Systems

By Jacob Verhoeks, March 2026 The cost of building software has collapsed. Claude Code ships features in minutes. Codex opens pull requests while you sleep. Cursor and Windsurf turn IDEs into conversation partners. The cost of knowing what to build has not changed at all. That gap is where The Art of Agents lives. Thirteen chapters mapping Sun Tzu's Art of War to the discipline of building agentic AI systems that actually work in production. The Thesis You don't spec then build. You build to discover the spec. When agents can scaffold a full-stack application in an afternoon, the question is no longer "can we build this?" It's "should we build this, and how do we know if it worked?" The answer is the specification. But the spec comes after the experiment, not before it. You build a quick version, expose it to real users, collect feedback, and then write the spec that captures what you actually learned. The spec is not the starting gun. It's the trophy you earn by running the race. The