Anthropic’s Alex Albert (Claude Relations) sits down with Erik Schluntz (Multi-Agent Research and co-author of our blog post, Building Effective Agents) for a discussion on the evolution of agents over the past six months, including tips for building multi-agent systems, common multi-agent patterns, and best practices for using skills, MCP servers, and tools.
00:00 - Introductions
00:35 - Training Claude to tackle agentic tasks
1:30 - Making Claude more autonomous with code
3:20 - Using the Claude Agent SDK to build agents
5:00 - Tips for using Agent Skills
6:40 - The evolution of workflows and agents (workflows of agents)
8:30 - The value of simple agent architectures
9:30 - Building multi-agent systems: orchestrators, subagents, and tool calling
11:40 - Training Claude to use subagents
12:25 - Multi-agent use design patterns: parallelization, MapReduce, and test-time compute
13:20 - Coordinating problem solving with tools and subagents
14:15 - Common agent failure modes
15:00 - Best practices for getting started with building agents (context engineering, MCPs, and tools)
17:15 - The future of agents: coding, computer use, and beyond
Read the original blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents
Learn more about Agent Skills: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-with-agent-skills