Everything Around the Agent
What you build
How to take this course
Foundations
The Agent Is Already in Your Codebase
Determinism Is the Wrong Goal
The Boundary: Authored vs Applied
Five Disciplines People Keep Confusing
Placing the five disciplines
2 attempts allowed
The Repo Teaches the Agent Three Ways
Charter Engineering
CLAUDE.md: The Front Door
Implementation
Rule Files, and the Rules About Rules
Implementation
Guides and the Example the Agent Copies
Implementation
Where Charter Lives, and What the Agent Remembers
Implementation
The Code Is Charter Too
Implementation
Boring Code and Tests the Agent Can Run
Implementation
Tools and Permissions: Bounding What the Agent Can Do
Implementation
Hooks: Deterministic Automation on an Event
Implementation
Slash Commands: A Saved Prompt You Invoke by Name
Implementation
Skills: A Capability the Model Reaches For
Implementation
Subagents: A Specialized Worker in Its Own Context
Implementation
MCP Servers: Capability From Outside the Agent
Implementation
Plugins and Marketplaces: Charter You Distribute
Implementation
Contracts, Phases, and Gates
Implementation
Keeping the Charter Alive
Implementation
Capstone: a charter that runs
Charter, checked
2 attempts allowed
Harness Engineering
The Harness, Defined
In code
When You Actually Need a Harness
In code
Inherit the Agent, Configure the Difference
In code
Force the Output Into a Shape You Can Check
In code
What the Model Sees Each Turn
In code
Building Tools: An MCP Server From First Principles
In code
The boundary
Every Tool Is Unsupervised Power
In code
Verification Is a Node, Not a Question
In code
Test the Harness Like the Code It Is
In code
Capstone: the mender, wired
Harness, checked
2 attempts allowed
Graph Engineering
The Thing That Decides What Runs Next
In code
Control Flow as a Graph
In code
Two Shapes: The Pipeline and the Loop
Pick the shape
2 attempts allowed
Running the Phases, and Asking for a Human
When One Agent Is Not Enough
The Factory
The Loop That Spends Money
In code
A Factory Is a Distributed System
In code
You Cannot Watch It, So Instrument It
In code
Ship It: The Factory, Assembled
Capstone: the mending factory
In code
The factory, checked
2 attempts allowed
Harness Engineering
Minimum price
$40.00
$60.00
You pay
Author earns
About
About the Course
Instructor
About the Instructor
Ian Johnson is a staff engineer at Parento, where he runs the engineering team's adoption of AI coding agents and the harness work that keeps that adoption from breaking in production. He owns Huckleberry, a small consultancy that helps engineering teams make AI-generated code shippable. He wrote Keystone, an open-source binary that scaffolds an opinionated harness into any repo in one command, then gets out of the way and leaves markdown the team can edit. Three earlier tools — Bridle, Sellier, and intent-driven-delivery — preceded Keystone, each one shipped publicly, each one teaching a specific lesson the book consolidates. He has been writing about this work at blog.tacoda.dev since 2024, with fifteen-plus long-form posts behind it. He lives outside Austin with his family.
Material
Course Material
The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms...
Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase
We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.
(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)
In fact, authors have earned over $15 million writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Write and Publish on Leanpub
You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!
Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.
Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.