A Claude agent that works in a demo can fail quickly in production. Tool calls break, context expands, permissions spread, costs drift, and failures become difficult to diagnose. This book gives engineers, technical leads, and architects a practical approach to building Claude-powered agents with clear controls for safety, observability, and day-to-day operations.

It covers agent loops, context management, model selection, safe tool registration, hooks, skills, MCP servers, plugins, and the Claude Agent SDK. It also shows how to move interactive Claude Code workflows into headless deployments while maintaining control of permissions, secrets, sessions, and audit trails.

Production guidance addresses sandboxing, managed settings, evaluation, observability, cost engineering, and failure handling. Additional chapters examine dispatch patterns, session management, multi-agent boundaries, team workflows, deployment options, and reference architectures.

Across thirty-one chapters and five practical appendices, the book provides implementation guidance and code examples, plus a ninety-day production-readiness checklist, an evaluation starter kit, and an MCP server audit template.

Use it to make deliberate engineering decisions about how agents run, what they can access, how their behavior is measured, and what happens when they fail.