Free Lesson
Building Effective Agent Harnesses
45 min
Jul 23, 2026 6:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)
In this video
What you'll learn
See what turns an LLM call into an agent
Build the core loop: give the model tools, let it act, return the result, and repeat until the task is done.
Build the harness around the model
Use context, state, guardrails, traces, MCP, hooks, cron jobs, sub-agents, and feedback to shape reliable behavior.
Steal the right ideas from modern agent harnesses
Study Pi, Codex, and Claude Code, then decide which ideas your users need and which belong on a conference slide.
Why this topic matters
Agent frameworks have an impressive talent for making every feature feel mandatory. Memory! Planning! Multi-agent orchestration! You ain't gonna need most of it. We’ll build an agent loop from first principles, examine MCP, hooks, cron jobs, and sub-agents, and learn from Pi, Codex, and Claude Code so you can decide what belongs in your harness and what belongs on a conference slide.
You'll learn from
Hugo Bowne-Anderson
AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students (ex-Yale)
Coached teams at
