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 …
Claude Code Casual, Pro, Elite: The Three Working Personas of Claude Code Mastery
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Claude Code Personas Part 16: A short, honest map of how much Claude Code setup your work actually needs, so you stop measuring yourself against a maximalist ideal you may never require. In this …
Claude Code Platforms: Stop Picking a Favorite: Where to Actually Run Claude Code
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Claude Code Part 11 Platforms: CLI, IDE, Desktop, or web. Each surface runs the same engine, and the engineers who get the most out of Claude Code switch between them mid-task without thinking twice. …
Claude Code Permissions: You Are Keyboard-Mashing ‘y’. Here Is How to Stop.
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Claude Code 5: Auto mode is the best feature of 2026 so far. Permission modes let you calibrate exactly how much an AI agent can do without asking you first. Master them, and “approve, …
Claude Code Agent Teams and Worktrees: One Claude Is Not Enough: Running Parallel Sessions Without Collisions
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Claude Code Agent Teams Part 15: How git worktrees and agent teams let you scale Claude Code beyond a single terminal, without overwrites, lost edits, or duplicated work In this article: A single Claude …
Claude Code Plugins: Your Claude Code Setup Is Trapped in One Repo. Plugins Set It Free.
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Claude Code Plugins 14: Plugins are how to package the skills, subagents, hooks, and MCP servers you have already built into a Claude Code plugin your whole team installs in a single command. You …
Claude Code Memory: Why You Keep Explaining the Same Thing to Claude (and the Five Layers That Fix It)
Author(s): Rick Hightower Originally published on Towards AI. Part 7: The five layers of Claude Code memory that stop your AI from repeating its mistakes, and how to route each fact to the right one. You tell Claude Code that your project …
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