Richard Matthew Hightower
Former Senior Director & Distinguished Engineer, Capital One | Founder, Spillwave Solutions • Spillwave Solutions
Austin, Texas, United States •
$5,001 - $10,000
4.6 (10 reviews)
About
Rick doesn't just talk about AI: he's built and shipped it at scale at multiple industries. His talks are grounded in real production failures and fixes, not slides full of theory. Audiences walk away with frameworks they can apply the next day. He recently spoke to a sold-out crowd at the Austin Claude Code Meetup on three generations of LLM agent orchestration, and his Harness Engineering series on Medium has reached over 830,000 readers. Whether it's a 45-minute keynote or a full-day hands-on workshop, he adjusts depth to the room and keeps executives and engineers engaged. Rick is an Anthropic Certified Claude Architect, and is under contract with Manning publishing to write a book on AI Harness Engineering.
Speaking Topics
Signature Programs (1)
In this talk, I’ll share the real evolution of a production research pipeline through three generations of Claude Code-based orchestration: (1) “skills-only” prompt chains that shipped fast but collapsed under retries, parallelism, and quality requirements; (2) a Claude Code subagent–driven orchestrator that runs do/judge loops, introducing adversarial checker agents to pressure-test outputs and drive measurable quality gains; and (3) a shift to a more deterministic workflow using the Claude Agent SDK, where Python owns the control plane (retries, state, budgets, and concurrency) and agents are scoped to bounded reasoning tasks. Along the way, I’ll cover what failed in early versions (including why v2 initially underperformed v1), what tweaks were required to make adversarial subagents pay off, and the key boundary that unlocks reliability: LLMs should do the thinking, while code should manage the work. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns for harness-engineered, observable, repeatable multi-agent systems that can hold up in real-world use.
Duration
45 minutes
Delivery
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