I’m realizing there’s more to AI engineering than just building agents

A developer, after learning tools like LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, and CrewAI and building several projects, realized that AI engineering involves more than just agent construction. They noted the ease of getting caught up in tools without understanding underlying mechanisms. The developer is curious if others returned to fundamentals after building agents or if deeper concepts were learned through more projects, and what projects helped move beyond basic chatbot/agent demos.