Loop Engineering + Graph Engineering: Building a Compounding Second Brain with OKF-based LLM Wiki
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. From Session Loops to Persistent Graphs: OKF, the Second Brain, and Compounding Agent Systems Summary: This article shows how to stop paying for the same reasoning twice. It covers three foundations that decide whether …
Grok Bot, Claude Code, and Codex Share One Second Brain
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Reads on main. Writes on a worktree/branch. How typed links and a write boundary stop agents from clobbering each other. Summary: The context window is the agent’s working memory. I have agents running in …
CrewAI I: The Multi-Agent System You Keep Hand-Wiring, Already Built
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Part 1: The throwaway orchestration glue you keep rewriting every time two LLM calls have to cooperate is exactly the thing CrewAI was built to delete. You have done this before. Two model calls …
Anthropic’s Claude Certified Architect Exam (CCA-F): Everything Important Was in the Middle, So Claude Forgot It. VI
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. CCA-F Part 6: The smallest CCA-F domain by weight is the one that passers say surprised them most. Context management is a design problem, not a config knob, and how to manage what you …
When the Law Changes, Your Agreements Should Too
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Building a human-in-the-loop regulatory-change agent on the Docusign MCP Server, with Claude Cowork and no code In this article we connect the Docusign MCP Server to Claude Cowork, load real agreements, build the workflow …
Anthropic’s Claude Certified Architect Exam (CCA-F): The Schema Validated. The Data Was Still Wrong. V
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. CCA-F Part 5: A passing JSON schema proves your output has the right shape. It proves nothing about whether the values are true. That gap is the single most punishing area on the live …
Loop Engineering
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. The Bottleneck Is Not the Model. It is you. Stop being the loop. Start designing the system that does the work. Let’s play AI buzzword bingo! After introducing the term “Loop Engineering,” the article …
Claude Agent SDK Custom Tools and MCP: The Built-In Tools Got You Started. These Three Moves Are How the Agent Grows Up.
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Part 7: Custom tools let your Claude agent call your code. MCP connects it to the outside world. Subagents let it delegate. Here is how all three fit the same agent without bloating it. …
Grok Build: The Fourth Contender in the AI Coding Agent Race. Grok Build vs. Codex, OpenCode and Claude Code
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Grok Build vs. Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode… May the battle begin! Grok Build comes out swinging fists from the hip! Competition is good for builders because every new contender forces the coding-agent giants to …
Claude Code — Mastering Channels: Stop Walking Back to Your Laptop: Push the World into a Running Claude Session
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Part 2: Claude Code channels turn CI failures, bug reports, and deploy alerts into messages that to the session that already knows your codebase. Telegram, Discord, iMessage, and your own webhooks Every alert pulls …
Claude Agent SDK Permissions: An AI Agent With Shell Access Is a Loaded Gun. Permissions Are the Safety.
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Most developers grant their Claude agent every tool with a cheerful one-line list and move on. Here are the four controls that actually decide what it can do, and the order they fire in. …
Google’s Graveyard Comes for AI Tooling
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Google’s pattern of abruptly sunsetting developer tools and how to future‑proof your AI projects. If you bet on Gemini CLI in the last six months, you got an email on May 19, 2026. It …
Claude Cowork Connectors: Cowork Is Only as Useful as What You Let It Touch
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Part 3: Connectors, the browser, and computer use are three ways Claude reaches your real work. Knowing which one fires when is the difference between seconds and minutes. Your competitor brief was good but …
Claude Cowork Permissions: Keeping Claude Cowork on a Leash
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Part 4: An agent that can read your files, drive your apps, and act on your behalf needs a different kind of trust. Here is how Cowork’s safety model works, and the habits that …
Claude Code Pitfalls: Claude Code Won’t Do What You Told It: A Troubleshooting Catalog
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Part 17: Why your config looks right but Claude ignores it, and the exact commands that diagnose it in seconds In this article: Most Claude Code failures are not mysteries. They are a small …
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