# Teaching the Agent Our Craft: Structured Agentic Development on a Real Codebase

DevFeed: [Teaching the Agent Our Craft: Structured Agentic Development on a Real Codebase](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/teaching-the-agent-our-craft-structured-agentic-development-on-a-real-codebase-33280.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://8thlight.com/insights/teaching-the-agent-our-craft-structured-agentic-development-on-a-real-codebase>)

Author: Alex Haldeman

Published: 2026-07-06T16:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [8th Light](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/8th-light.md>), [8th Light Insights](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/8th-light-insights.md>)

Topics: [Agentic development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/agentic-development.md>), [Claude Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/claude-code.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [AI-assisted coding](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-assisted-coding.md>), [Test-driven development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tdd.md>)

Tags: [agentic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agentic.md>), [agentic-development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agentic-development.md>), [ai-and-emerging-tech](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-and-emerging-tech.md>), [claude-code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/claude-code.md>), [clean-architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/clean-architecture.md>), [structured](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/structured.md>), [test](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/test.md>)

## AI overview

8th Light describes a structured agentic development workflow built around Claude Code. The approach adapts Research-Plan-Implement by separating research, planning, and implementation, adding review cycles and involving product managers and designers at each transition. It also applies test-driven development, clean architecture, and explicit project conventions to address common agent failure modes.

## Source excerpt

The Mission We recently partnered with a startup that had developed a clinically proven approach to alleviating neuroplastic chronic pain. Their program worked: a coach-led model that helped patients ease chronic pain at a lower cost than conventional treatment. The problem was reach. The in-person model could not scale to the demand they were seeing, and there were not enough coaches to close the gap. We were brought in to build a digital platform that could deliver the program to every patient who needed it. Our Development Philosophy and Inspiration At 8th Light, we approach agentic development the same way we approach any software engagement: with discipline around test-driven development, clean architecture, and code that is built to embrace change. But agentic development comes with its own failure modes. An agent produces code that covers the happy path and misses critical behaviors. A context window fills with stale reasoning from earlier attempts, and the agent starts working against itself. Without explicit conventions, the output works but looks like nobody on the team wrote it. Tyler Burleigh's Research-Plan-Implement gave us a useful frame for thinking about this. His core observation: the bottleneck is not code generation, it is ensuring the model understands what to build before it starts building. RPI addresses that by separating research, planning, and implementation into distinct phases, each with a review cycle before the next begins. We adapted that structure into our Claude Code workflow, with the additional goal of keeping product managers and designers genuinely in the loop at each transition, not just developers. What follows is a description of the harness we built from a Claude Code-specific perspective. The HarnessStructure Before walking through the pieces, it helps to see how they fit together. Everything that teaches the agent our craft lives in a handful of files at the project root and inside a single .claude/ directory. None of it is