January 15, 2026
I posted about context engineering for voice agents a few days ago, and realized I should also point people to @mark_backman's "Instruction Following and Workflows" tutorial from last year.
Mark takes you from "this is going to be easy" through the "you're looking like the crazy guy with the conspiracy board" meme all the way out the other side to prompt and context engineering success. Or at least, gives you tools to tackle long multi-turn, realworld agent challenges:
- LLM reliability and context window limits
- Strategies for managing context
- Pipecat Flows state machine library
- Will we need all this "harness stuff" forever?
Full session[1]
Getting started with open source voice agent tooling[2]
Chad's Pipecat Flows technical overview[3]