Reference Index
The map to Anthropic's published material for builders. Every entry links to the original, which is always the authority.
How this index works
Anthropic's builder material lives on five separate surfaces that do not cross-reference each other in any organized way. This page lists what exists and where, so you can go to the primary source.
Entries are summarized in one line and linked. Nothing is reproduced here. Where a date is known it is given, because in this field a post from eighteen months ago and a post from last month can describe genuinely different APIs.
The five surfaces
| Surface | Scale | What it actually holds |
|---|---|---|
| anthropic.com/engineering | ~25 posts | The deep technical canon. Small, dense, high signal. |
| claude.com/blog | ~193 posts | The primary developer stream. Largest and least discovered. Older anthropic.com/news developer URLs now redirect here. |
| platform.claude.com/docs | ~541 pages | Messages API, Managed Agents, prompting and evaluation guidance. |
| code.claude.com/docs | ~171 pages | A separate domain. The entire Agent SDK reference lives here. |
| Code with Claude sessions and talks | ~140 sessions, ~79 videos | Conference material, much of it with recordings. |
| Anthropic Academy | ~21 courses | Structured courses. |
Start here: the load-bearing posts
If you read nothing else, read these. Each is linked to the original.
- Building effective agents (Dec 2024). The founding taxonomy: the augmented LLM, then workflow patterns, then agents. The source of the recurring advice to find the simplest thing that works before adding complexity.
- Effective context engineering for AI agents (Sep 2025). Treats context as a finite resource with diminishing returns.
- Writing effective tools for agents (Sep 2025). Tool design as the agent-computer interface.
- Demystifying evals for AI agents (Jan 2026). How to evaluate when the output is a trajectory rather than a string.
- Scaling Managed Agents (Apr 2026). Anthropic's own framing of why harnesses go stale and what a managed platform stabilizes.
- Effective harnesses for long-running agents (Nov 2025). Initializer agents, progress files, environment management.
For founders specifically
- The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup (May 2026). Stage-by-stage, with named failure modes.
- Building AI agents for startups (Nov 2025). Where to start when oversight already exists and imperfect automation is survivable.
Cost and unit economics
The highest-ROI reading in the whole corpus for anyone running a real bill.
- Lessons from building Claude Code: prompt caching is everything (Apr 2026). Caching treated as architecture rather than optimization.
- Prompt caching with Claude. The durable economics of cache writes versus cache reads.
- The advisor strategy (Apr 2026). Pairing a more capable advisor model with a cheaper executor.
Agent architecture and coordination
- Common workflow patterns for AI agents (Mar 2026). Sequential, parallel, evaluator-optimizer, and when each is warranted.
- Building multi-agent systems: when and how (Jan 2026). Includes the token-cost multiple of multi-agent versus single-agent, and named failure modes.
- Multi-agent coordination patterns (Apr 2026). Five approaches with where each struggles.
- How we built our multi-agent research system (Jun 2025).
- Agent harness design (Apr 2026).
Tools, MCP, and skills
- Introducing advanced tool use (Nov 2025). Tool search and programmatic tool calling.
- Code execution with MCP (Nov 2025). Why writing code to call tools scales better than direct calls.
- Agent Skills (Oct 2025).
- Contextual Retrieval (Sep 2024).
Security and containment
- How we contain Claude across products (2026).
- Claude Code sandboxing (Oct 2025). Filesystem and network isolation boundaries.
- Zero Trust for AI agents (May 2026) and the agent identity access model (Jun 2026).
Runnable code
- anthropics/claude-cookbooks. Classification, retrieval, tool use, evaluations, caching.
- anthropics/claude-quickstarts. Complete starter projects.
- anthropics/launch-your-agent. A Claude Code skill that interviews a founder, scopes a first version, launches it on Managed Agents, grades it, and schedules it. The closest thing Anthropic ships to a guided path from idea to running agent.
- anthropics/cwc-long-running-agents. Workshop material on long-horizon reliability.
- anthropics/skills and anthropics/courses.
Where the gaps are
Worth knowing what is not well covered, so you stop searching for it: unit economics of an agent product beyond token pricing, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, reliability engineering against the API (retries, idempotency, circuit breakers, SLOs), model portability, evals as an operational asset at scale, regulated-industry engineering patterns, and latency engineering. Anthropic also rarely publishes the case for not building an agent at all.
Further Reading
- Case Studies who has already shipped on this
- The Index all 256 published customer stories in one table
- The startup cut companies that were small when they started
- Strength of evidence which published numbers hold up