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Please checkout SpillWave, we provide consulting, mentoring and can help you turn your ideas into production ready AI agents with harness engineering. We can also mentor your team with Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, RAG, Graph RAG, document ingestion, building agent workflows, working with agent skills, and a long list of other agentic tools.
About the Author — Claude Certified Architect
Rick Hightower is a former Senior Distinguished Engineer at a Fortune 100 company, focusing on delivering ML / AI insights to front-line applications, and a practitioner building multi-agent production systems. Rick is a Claude Certified Architect. Follow him on Medium for more hands-on agent engineering content. You can also book him to speak and train your team: Check out Rick Hightower’s SpeakerHub.
Rick created Skilz, the universal agent skill installer that supports 30+ coding agents, including Claude Code, Gemini, Copilot, and Cursor, and co-founded the world’s largest agentic skill marketplace. Connect with Rick Hightower on LinkedIn or Medium. Check out SpillWave, your source for AI expertise.

Rick has been actively developing generative AI systems, agents, and agentic workflows for years. He is the author of numerous agentic frameworks and developer tools and brings deep practical expertise to teams adopting AI. He enjoys writing about himself in the 3rd person.
Rick also wrote a Claude Certified Architect (CCA) series of articles that have a lot of useful information on writing agentic AI systems. Many ideas captured in the CCA and the exam prep Rick wrote echo what you see in this article. If you want to improve your ability to create well-behaved AI agents, studying for the CCA Exam is a good place to start.
CCA Exam Prep on Agentic Development
Claude Certified Architect: The Complete Guide to Passing the CCA Foundations Exam
CCA Exam Prep: Mastering the Code Generation with Claude Code Scenario
CCA Exam Prep: Mastering the Multi-Agent Research System Scenario
CCA Exam Prep: Mastering the Customer Support Resolution Agent Scenario
Get the complete reading list for CCA-F exam prep articles from this Claude Certified Architect Exam Prep list.
Rick also wrote a series on harness engineering and how to improve agentic systems using harness engineering for feedback loops and adversarial agents. These articles also go hand in hand with this article.
Harness Engineering Articles
The $9 Disaster: What Anthropic’s Harness Design Paper Teaches Us About Building Autonomous AI
Harness Engineering vs Context Engineering: The Model is the CPU, the Harness is the OS
LangChain Deep Agents: Harness and Context Engineering: Memory, Skills, and Security
Beyond the AI Coding Hangover: How Harness Engineering Prevents the Next Outage
LangChain’s Harness Engineering: From Top 30 to Top 5 on Terminal Bench 2.0
Anthropic’s Harness Engineering: Two Agents, One Feature List, Zero Context Overflow
OpenAI’s Harness Engineering Experiment: Zero Manually-Written Code




