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AI Engineering in 2026

New primitives that didn't exist in the 2023 "just call the API" era. This section covers skills you need now — complementary to the core curriculum.

Who should read this section?

Background Start here
Finished courses 01–05 (foundations) Context Engineering → Loop Engineering
Building agents (courses 07–08) Claude Code + Skills & Rules
Production LLMOps (courses 12–13) Loop Engineering outer loop + Agent Evals

These pages are practitioner guides — they connect 2026 tooling (Claude Code, Cursor skills, MCP) to the handbook's modules without replacing depth lessons in Foundations or Build.

flowchart LR
  CC[Claude Code] --> Loop[Loop engineering]
  Skills[Skills & rules] --> Loop
  Loop --> Harness[Harness]
  Ctx[Context engineering] --> Harness
  Harness --> Ship[Production agents]

Topics in this section

Topic What you'll learn Page
Claude Code Agentic terminal coding, permissions, workflows Claude Code
Skills & rules SKILL.md, Cursor skills, persistent agent instructions Skills & Rules
Loop engineering Inner/outer loops, /loop, scheduled agents, harness cycles Loop Engineering
Context engineering What goes in the window — the new prompt engineering Context Engineering

How this fits the handbook

2026 skill Handbook foundation
Claude Code Agent Engineering → Harness
Skills files Course 11 · Prompts
Loop engineering Agent Loop, Course 08
Context engineering Course 02 · Tokens, Memory

What's still evolving (2026)

Trend Status Handbook coverage
Reasoning models (o3, R1) Production Course 05 · Reasoning models
MCP everywhere Standardizing Course 08 · MCP
Computer use agents Early production Planned
Agent skills marketplaces Emerging Skills & Rules
Eval-driven development Best practice Course 13 · Evals

How to study this section (2-week add-on)

Week Focus Pages Hands-on
1 Context + skills Context Engineering, Skills & Rules Write a CLAUDE.md or SKILL.md for a repo you own
2 Loops + tooling Claude Code, Loop Engineering Run a local agent session; add one golden eval case

Pair with Agent Engineering for harness, memory, and orchestration depth.

OSS hubs to watch

Start: Claude Code →