Anthropic Just Dropped a Masterclass on Building Agent Harnesses (for Large Codebases)
Cole Medin turns Anthropic's high-level blog post into a working repo — seven concrete components for the AI Layer that wraps Claude Code.
May 21stA 4-hour zero-to-orchestrator curriculum for designers who have never opened a terminal — taught by someone who actually runs a design business on it.
Designers who learn to orchestrate AI agents rather than execute design work themselves are entering the same career-defining window that early Figma adopters had in 2016.
Designers who treat AI as an execution tool will be outpaced by those who learn to orchestrate it. This four-hour course teaches a practical framework for agentic design across three phases: understanding how AI agents actually work, loading your own context into Claude Code through a structured CLAUDE.md and three-layer architecture, then applying that setup across four modes — Discover, Create, Systematize, and Automate. The course covers live builds including UX review bots, on-brand site generation, an AI-native design system, and a multiplayer game. The core takeaway is that system-level thinking — not one-off prompt use — is what separates designers who stay relevant from those who get replaced.
Modern Creator members can chat with any breakdown — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment. Unlocks at T2: refer 3 friends + add your own API key.
Create a free account →
Sets up the thesis: design is moving from doing the work to directing agents that do the work. PMs+AI+design-systems can already ship 80% interfaces, so designers must speed up or become the bottleneck. The window is 'Figma in 2016' wide open.

Three buckets: (1) understand the tech, (2) bring your own context, (3) put it to work. Plus what's NOT covered: design taste, judgment, traditional craft — that's still on you.

Chat (you ask, AI answers, you copy-paste) vs Agent (you direct, AI does). Live demo: parking-permit form UX review — chat reads HTML and lists 15 generic issues; Claude Code spawns Maria + Jake + heuristic sub-agents that fill the form live in Chrome and report back with a 14/40 UX health score. Then maps the tool landscape: legacy Figma vs agentic design tools (Stitch/Make/UX Pilot) vs general agentic (Claude Code/Cursor).

Defines the agentic loop: you give direction, agent executes, you review, you redirect. Talks about tool use, sub-agents, memory, context windows. Why 'AI is not a silver bullet' — competence without judgment is dangerous.

Pricing/plans, installation (Claude subscription + IDE software + Claude Code extension), 'Your Controls' walkthrough of the Claude Code UI, file system orientation, what auto-accept / plan mode / bypass permissions actually do.

Show-and-tell of CLAUDE.md as a 'design brief that runs before every conversation'. Same LinkedIn-PDF -> personal site demo, but with brand colors/tone/rules in CLAUDE.md gets a way more on-brand result. Markdown vs PDF — token economics, why .md is the LLM-native format.

The reliability unlock: instructions (rules) -> orchestration (skills) -> execution. Two-layer (just rules + execution) breaks down as complexity grows. Skills are .skill.md files with YAML frontmatter — recipes the agent invokes by name.

MCPs and tool calls — bringing Figma, browser, Slack, your email into the agent. 'Tech context' as a separate slide section. How an agent picks which tool to use.

Builds the Color Thief skill in ~12 min. Then lists 8 more skills you could build the same way: Review Miner, Tone Scraper, Heuristic Audit, Jobs-to-be-Done Mapper, Business Model Mapper, Survey-to-Persona, Strategy Mapper. The constraint is imagination, not capability.

Three creation demos: (1) make the LinkedIn-derived personal site live with Netlify free tier, (2) build the Color Thief skill end-to-end, (3) build NumberDrop — a multiplayer estimation game for his students that uses Google Maps as the core UI element. Iterates with plan mode + 'simulate 7 teams' to stress-test the UI before real players touch it.

Hands off to Tom (program director at the MBA). They built an AI-native design system because they finally needed one — and designed it so any agent generating new code automatically produces on-brand UI without a human reviewing every component. Two-host segment.

Builds a real automation: a cron'd Trigger.dev job that DMs each team lead asking for a status update, then summarises the responses into a clean Slack post for the whole team. Live setup of GitHub auth, Slack scopes, the .env pattern, and the deployment to cloud infra.

Acknowledges the space moves so fast even this video will age. Soft pitch for an Agentic Design Community (paid, domain already bought) — but transparent he won't build it unless enough people sign up. Link in description.
Faljic's 'executioner to orchestrator' frame is the exact pitch Joe should be making to solo creators — and the 3-layer architecture is the exact spine JoeFlow / Paperclip should ship as a template.
“We are moving from a world where most designers are primarily executioners to a world where most designers will need to become orchestrators.”
“It's almost like learning Figma in 2016.”
“Being fluent with AI agents is a huge advantage on the job market. But soon it might be a hygiene factor.”
“CLAUDE.md is almost like a design brief that runs before every conversation.”
“PMs with an AI tool and a design system can draft an 80% interface, something that's 80 to 90% good enough.”
“The constraint is just your imagination and also your use case, and it's so easy to build this.”
Faljic opens with a thesis disguised as a welcome: design is splitting into a world of executioners and a world of orchestrators, and the four hours you're about to spend are the on-ramp to the second one. No engineering background required; he doesn't have one either.
Maps where every tool sits and what it actually replaces. The point: general agentic isn't competing with Figma — it expands what a designer can ship.
The reliability unlock. Two-layer setups (instructions + execution only) get unreliable as complexity grows. The orchestration layer is what makes agentic workflows production-grade.
The career-shift framing for designers. Same shift Joe is teaching for solo creators — stop renting tools, stop executing every step yourself, become the conductor.
Ready-made shopping list of skills any team can build in an afternoon. Each takes 10-15 min once you have one working skill to copy from.
After Claude Code builds something, open a NEW chat to review it. The original instance has confirmation bias; the fresh one doesn't. Bonus: hand the same code to a different model (Codex) for a third pair of eyes.
“I'm playing with an idea I call an agentic design community. I even bought a domain already. It's a place where we would regularly do trainings, where we would break down new tools as they drop. I don't know if I will build it yet — depends whether enough of you actually want it. If this sounds interesting, click the first link in the description and join the wait list.”
Soft, honest, last-90-seconds. No newsletter pitch, no sponsor through the body of the video. The transparency ('I might not even build it') is the strongest CTA mechanic — it makes signing up feel like a vote, not a transaction.
00:01
05:03
07:18
12:42
13:33
17:33
21:54
25:16
28:39
31:47
34:09
40:02
42:07
46:18
48:29
53:48
54:06
57:56
60:56
64:06
68:42
71:25
75:07
77:33
82:48
84:53
87:41
91:20
94:29
97:46
102:48
107:03
107:58
112:54
116:17
119:39
123:01
125:00
129:46
134:09
136:30
139:26
144:09
145:11
150:47
151:47
155:09
158:53
162:07
166:01
168:58
173:35
175:30
178:57
183:41
187:04
191:16
192:27
195:32
200:02
205:34
207:17
210:39
214:02
216:59
220:53
223:13
227:32
230:53
234:26
236:07
240:54
243:55
246:07
250:13
253:00
256:17
260:09
262:55
267:31Cole Medin turns Anthropic's high-level blog post into a working repo — seven concrete components for the AI Layer that wraps Claude Code.
May 21stA 12-minute demo proving that two install commands and one prompt can take your AI-built UI from generic purple gradients to near-professional design.
November 18th 2025Teresa Torres runs her entire life and business from two Claude Code terminals. This is how she built it.
December 21st 2025A 12-minute deep-dive into the /handoff skill -- why it beats /compact for parallel sessions, and two real-world patterns for staying smart across multiple agents.
May 21stHow to embed Karpathy's four AI-coding guardrails into CLAUDE.md — and wire them to Superpowers, GSD, and G-Stack for the full workflow.
May 17thMatt Pocock retires his viral interview skill and introduces /grill-with-docs -- a DDD-powered replacement that builds shared language as it grills.
May 14th