/ the-workshop
The Harness Engineering Workshop
Five live mornings. Each day builds one layer of your own coding harness, in the spirit of pi — from a bare loop to a durable, orchestrated agent you demo on Friday. Enrolled students get the complete 35-chapter book, the quizzes, and the guided build projects.
5 live days one layer per day · 7:00–9:00 AM IST
Day 1
The Anatomy of a Harness
Why 'just call the API' fails; prompt vs. context vs. harness engineering; the agent loop from first principles. Build: a bare harness — model client, message array, and a hand-rolled loop.
Day 2
Tools & the Execution Environment
Tool schemas as contracts; read / write / edit / bash / search; permission gates and approval modes; sandboxing and the blast radius. Build: real file and shell tools wired into your loop, safely.
Day 3
Context Engineering Inside the Harness
Context budgets; compaction and summarization; memory and the CLAUDE.md pattern; system prompts as infrastructure. Build: compaction plus a persistent memory layer that survives a long session.
Day 4
Durability, Recovery & Orchestration
Checkpointing every turn and tool call; replay on restart; self-healing loops; sub-agents and handoffs; supervision and human-in-the-loop. Build: checkpointed execution and a sub-agent dispatcher with an approval gate.
Day 5
Production Harnesses & Capstone
pi, Hermes and Claude Code internals; how to evaluate a harness. Capstone: assemble the loop, tools, context engine, recovery and orchestration into your own pi-style harness and demo it live.