Jia Huang
Lead Research Engineer at A*STAR Singapore · Author
I write about agent architecture from inside the engineering trenches — what the harness actually does, why composing patterns matters more than picking models, and how the next decade of AI systems will be built.
The thesis I keep coming back to: agent architecture is the design of bounded resource allocation under uncertainty. The model spends; the harness budgets.
Designing AI Agents — the design-pattern catalogue for production AI agents.
Two buckets, one carrier — every agent design decision is a balance.
Recent Writing
Books
- Designing AI Agents — Manning. The design-pattern catalogue for production AI agents: 27 patterns across 7 cognitive functions and 6 topologies.
- RAG from First Principles — Packt. The full RAG stack from first principles — ingestion, chunking, vector stores, retrieval optimization, GraphRAG, Agentic RAG.
- Six Chinese-language books on machine learning, GPT, AI agents, RAG, data analysis — cumulative readers in the hundreds of thousands. See Chinese list →
Training Demos
I keep a small library of runnable Agent training cases. The current finance track includes LSEG workshop demos for regulatory document analysis, multi-agent ticket review, and Copilot-driven spec development.
About
I am a Lead Research Engineer at A*STAR Singapore, formerly senior consultant at Accenture Singapore, with twenty years across NLP, LLMs, and AI applications in MedTech and FinTech. I am also a certified counsellor with seven years volunteering on a Singapore counselling helpline, a background that quietly shapes how I write about agents: the most important thing the harness does is the same thing a phone counsellor does — read meaning out of a narrow channel, decide when to escalate, build trust call by call.
Newsletter
I write a free newsletter, Agent Design Patterns, on Substack. One essay every 1–2 weeks. Structural observation, not hype.
Or read on Substack directly · LinkedIn.