The Mentor's Handbook
Teaching Harness Engineering — everything a mentor must learn, from the agent loop up, to deliver the five-day workshop and build a pi-style harness live with the cohort. Every chapter teaches the idea from the ground up — plain words, a metaphor, a by-hand example, the real math, where it runs in production today, and a minute-by-minute plan for teaching it. Read it in order; by the end you can deliver the entire workshop. 18 chapters.
Start: how to use this handbook →The mindset and the single story that connects all five days: build a coding harness like pi, one layer at a time.
The bedrock: what a harness even is, the three engineering disciplines, and the five layers, explained so simply a beginner keeps up.
Day 1. How to teach the agent loop from first principles and get the class to a working bare harness.
Day 2. How to teach tool schemas, wiring real file/shell tools into the loop, and the permission + sandbox story.
Day 3. How to teach the context window as a scarce resource, compaction, and memory.
Day 4. How to teach checkpointing, recovery, and sub-agents under supervision.
Turning understanding into five great live days, and running the capstone.