AIPTDEst. 1995
Workshop · Developer · Level 3

Claude Code: Agentic Systems At Scale

Programmatic, multi-agent systems built on the Claude Code agent harness. Orchestration, MCP, evals, security, and production hardening for staff, platform, and senior engineers.


This is the capstone of the developer track. Where Level 1 made you fluent at the CLI and Level 2 made Claude Code customizable and team-shareable, Level 3 treats Claude Code as infrastructure: an agent harness to build software on rather than a tool to type into.

Over two intensive sessions you will move from a human-at-the-keyboard model to programmatic, multi-agent systems: embedding the agent loop in your own services, orchestrating workers in parallel, exposing your internal systems as tools, and running long-lived agents safely inside CI and production surfaces.

The throughline is reliability. Anyone can spawn an agent; the senior engineer's job is to know it works, keep it working, bound its cost, and contain its blast radius. You will leave with an evaluated, secured, production-grade multi-agent workflow you can defend in an architecture review.


By the end of this course, learners will be able to architect, evaluate, and operate agentic systems built on Claude Code. They will:

  • Embed the Claude Code agent loop programmatically, moving beyond simple headless scripts into the SDK / agent harness inside their own applications and services
  • Design multi-agent architectures: orchestrator-worker patterns, parallel fan-out / fan-in, and durable state for long-running agents
  • Expose internal systems as reliable tools through MCP servers, with per-agent tool permissioning
  • Build evaluation harnesses for agentic workflows: golden tasks, regression suites, and drift detection wired into CI
  • Contain risk at scale: prompt-injection defense, supply-chain review of third-party skills and MCP servers, sandboxed execution, secrets handling, and token-cost governance
  • Ship a production-grade multi-agent workflow with human-in-the-loop checkpoints and observability

Topic Outline

Two sessions, six modules

One curriculum · delivered across two hands-on sessions

Module 01SDK

From CLI to SDK: Programmatic Claude Code

  • Treating the agent loop as a library: invoking, streaming, and capturing structured output through the SDK / agent harness
  • Embedding headless mode inside your own apps, bots, and services
  • Seeding context, persisting state, and resuming work across invocations
  • Drawing the decision boundary between an interactive session and an automated agent
Module 02Orchestration

Multi-Agent Orchestration

  • Building orchestrator-worker architectures where a planner decomposes work and delegates to specialized workers
  • Spawning workers concurrently and reconciling their results with parallel fan-out / fan-in
  • Deciding what each agent should and shouldn't see, and why context isolation aids reliability
  • Checkpointing long-running work so a failure doesn't cost the whole run
Module 03Tools & MCP

Tools, MCP, and Custom Capability

  • Graduating from the first local MCP server to production servers that wrap internal systems and data as first-class tools
  • Designing tools for reliability with narrow contracts, deterministic outputs, and good error surfaces
  • Giving each agent the smallest tool set it needs with per-agent permissioning
  • Pinning tools and models to specialized subagents
Module 04Evals

Evals and Reliability for Agentic Workflows

  • Curating golden tasks, a fixed set of representative jobs with known-good outcomes
  • Testing prompts, skills, and agents with regression suites, the way you test code
  • Defining and scoring 'good' for non-deterministic systems
  • Catching behavioral regressions in CI before they reach users
Module 05Security & Cost

Security and Cost at Scale

  • Defending against prompt injection, and why tool-using agents widen the attack surface
  • Vetting third-party skills and MCP servers before they touch your systems
  • Isolating tool execution in sandboxes, including self-hosted environments
  • Practicing credential hygiene, and governing token cost with caching and batching to keep spend predictable
Module 06Capstone

Production Patterns and the Capstone

  • Running long-lived autonomous agents with patterns for work that spans minutes to hours
  • Placing human-in-the-loop checkpoints, where to require approval and how to surface it
  • Deploying to CI pipelines, internal bots, and scheduled automation
  • Shipping an evaluated, sandboxed, observable capstone workflow you can defend in an architecture review

Upcoming Sessions

Cohort 01Live online

October 13 & 15, 2026

Schedule
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Tuition
US$495
Instructors
Josh Alpert
Cohort 02Live online

November 17 & 19, 2026

Schedule
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Tuition
US$495
Instructors
Josh Alpert

Programs can be customized for your organization. Delivered on-site, in-person, live-online, or asynchronously as a course library.
Inquire About Custom Solutions

Going Further

This Course Counts Toward A Certification

Interested in going further? This course is one of the catalog courses that make up the AI-Enabled Developer Certification. Complete the full path and pass the certificate exam to earn the credential.