Book Review: Beyond LLMs

Book Review: Beyond LLMs Amazon Code on GitHub Sahir Maharaj on LinkedIn I was offered to read Beyond LLMs: The Next Frontier of AI by Sahir Maharaj in exchange for an honest review. The book is about the parts of a production AI system that are built around the language model: explicit state, memory, planning, agents with limited permissions, deterministic rules, evaluation, and cost control. Its main argument is that most production failures are architectural. In the opening story, a support assistant that impressed everyone in a demo fails in its first week, because its engineer “asked one component to do everything: reason, remember, validate, decide, and respond.” The book follows one running example, SupportOps AI (a customer-support assistant), from a single model call in Chapter 1 to a multi-agent system with a rules layer at the end. The main argument matched my own experience. When I tested MiniMax M2.7 inside Claude Code, most failures happened because the prompt left a…