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Black Belt Part B — Push the Craft

Status: drafted · Time: 8 min · Audience: platform-builder Outcome: Understand what Part B teaches, what Part A muscle memory it assumes, and the order to walk it in.

Part B promise. By the end, you can keep skills small with progressive disclosure, design memory systems for long-running agents, run prompt evals on shipped skills, instrument cost and observability at team and org scale, and tune effort settings + model routing + fall-backs.

Prerequisite. Part A complete (Quest B-1 claimed). Part B reads thin without the platform-builder craft from B.1–B.6. Time budget. ~3h for the five modules; ~8h for Quest B-2. Plan over a week or two.


Part A taught the platform layer: MCP servers, skill packs, Cowork marketplace entries, custom agents, multi-agent orchestration, tool design. Part B sharpens the craft on top of that platform: progressive disclosure for skills that stay small, memory systems for long-running agents, prompt evals that turn taste into measurement, cost-and-observability at scale, and the per-call tuning layer (effort, routing, fall-backs).

Five modules, one quest. The boss fight (POD-uplift embed) is in Part C; Black Belt is awarded when all three Parts close.


§ChapterPillarTime
B.7Progressive disclosure — skills that stay smallContext25 min
B.8Memory systems — auto-memory, session state, long-running agentsContext45 min
B.9Prompt evals — A/B, regression, golden setsPrompt45 min
B.10Cost attribution + observability at team + org scaleHarness30 min
B.11Effort settings, model routing, fall-backsHarness30 min

Walk them in order on a first read. B.7 anchors the Part B voice; B.8 and B.9 are the depth pair (memory and evaluation); B.10 and B.11 are the scaling pair (observability and routing).


Quest B-2 — Component contribution or full-stack feature. Either submit a Blade component via the contribution pipeline, or ship a feature involving a backend change you own end-to-end.


“I keep skills small, evaluate them empirically, instrument cost and observability at scale, and tune the per-call layer — and I have shipped either a Blade contribution or a full-stack feature to prove cross-layer ownership.”


Part C — Shape the Org: covers running office hours, embedded sprints, AI RFCs, API Council contributions, and skill / plugin governance. Closes the belt with Boss Fight B-B (POD-uplift embed) and the Black Belt badge.


Previous: ← Quest B-1 · Next: → B.7 Progressive disclosure