Autonomous systems require different operational patterns than deterministic software. You'll master five core design patterns including Supervisory Loops, Bounded Autonomy, and Progressive Fallback, while learning to avoid common anti-patterns like Retry Hell and Silent Success that plague production deployments.

Reliability in agentic systems means predictable behavior under uncertainty, not just uptime. We'll engineer reliability through checkpointing, budget-aware execution, and verifiable recovery—transforming operational concepts into executable control mechanisms using policy-as-code and evidence-based verification.