learn-harness-engineering

Quick Start: Improve Your Agent Today

You don't need to read all 14 lectures before you start getting value. If you're already using a coding agent on a real project, here's how to improve it right now.

The idea is simple: instead of just writing prompts, give your agent a set of structured files that define what to do, what's been done, and how to verify the work. These files live inside your repo, so every session starts from the same state.

    YOUR PROJECT ROOT
    ├── AGENTS.md              <-- the agent's operating manual
    ├── CLAUDE.md              <-- (alternative, if using Claude Code)
    ├── init.sh                <-- runs install + verify + start
    ├── feature_list.json      <-- what features exist, which are done
    ├── claude-progress.md     <-- session progress (historical filename; agent-agnostic)
    └── src/                   <-- your actual code

Grab the starter templates from the Resource Library and drop them into your project. That's it. Four files, and your agent sessions will already be significantly more stable than running on prompts alone.

claude-progress.md is a generic, repository-local session progress log; the name is retained for compatibility with the course examples. It is not tied to Claude Code and is not updated automatically by any agent. Codex, OpenHands, Antigravity, and other coding agents can use the same file when their root instructions tell them to read it at startup and update it before handoff.

Requirements

This is a course where you actually run coding agents.

You need at least one of these tools:

• Claude Code
• Codex
• Another IDE or CLI coding agent that supports file editing, command execution, and multi-step tasks

The course assumes you can:

• Open a local repository
• Allow the agent to edit files
• Allow the agent to run commands
• Inspect output and re-run tasks

If you don't have such a tool, you can still read the course content, but you won't be able to complete the projects as intended.