Appendix/Further Reading
Further Reading
The shortest path from continuous improvement roots to AI native improvement loops. Read these in order. They are the spine behind Chapters 13 through 15.
01
AccelerateNicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
The measurement spine for modern software delivery: delivery performance, quality, and organizational capabilities.
https://itrevolution.com/product/accelerate/
02
Site Reliability Engineering or The Site Reliability WorkbookGoogle
The operating model for production feedback loops: SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, incident learning, and automation with guardrails.
https://sre.google/books
03
"The Vision of Autonomic Computing"Jeffrey O. Kephart and David M. Chess
The classic self-managing-systems paper. Read this for MAPE-K: monitor, analyze, plan, execute, knowledge.
https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1363951793518051840?lang=en
04
"Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems"D. Sculley et al.
The cautionary paper for AI-backed improvement loops. It explains why ML/AI systems accumulate hidden maintenance risk quickly.
https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5656-hidden-technical-debt-in-machine-learning-systems
05
"MLOps: Continuous Delivery and Automation Pipelines in Machine Learning"Google Cloud
The CI/CD/CT bridge: continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous training, monitoring, and metadata.
https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/mlops-continuous-delivery-and-automation-pipelines-in-machine-learning
06
"Building Effective Agents"Anthropic
The modern agent engineering read. The useful takeaway: prefer simple workflows first, then add autonomy only where it earns its complexity.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents
07
OpenAI Evals / Agent Evals guides
Evals are the proof layer for AI systems. Read these before trusting agents to modify prompts, workflows, tools, or platform behavior.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/evalshttps://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/agent-evals
08
Toyota Production SystemTaiichi Ohno
The lean root: waste removal, flow, standard work, and improvement at the source.
https://www.routledge.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond-Large-Scale-Production/Ohno/p/book/9780915299140
09
Out of the CrisisW. Edwards Deming
The deeper quality-management root: improvement as a property of the system, not individual heroics.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535946/out-of-the-crisis/
Continuous improvement is not autonomous mutation. It is a measured feedback loop that observes, diagnoses, proposes, sandboxes, verifies, and only then applies changes through a gate.