Improve Agent Reliability with Strands Steering

Chapter 7 of the Building AI Agent Harnesses with Strands Agents course. System prompts set the agent's general personality and rules, but they're blunt. You can't easily say "only for this next tool call, format the output as JSON" or "when the user mentions billing, always check their account status first" without bloating the prompt with conditionals the model has to parse every single turn. Steering solves this by letting you inject context or instructions at specific moments, scoped to specific situations, without touching the system prompt. The model sees the steering message right when it needs it, and it doesn't clutter every other turn. This course teaches developers how to build AI agents and agent harnesses using the open-source Strands Agents SDK. The course starts by teaching what the difference between an agent and agent harness is, and progresses from fundamental concepts (the agent loop, model providers, tools) through intermediate patterns (hooks, plugins, steering, conversation management) to advanced multi-agent orchestration (agents-as-tools, graph workflows, agent swarms) and finally production operations (guardrails, observability, evaluation, cloud deployment). Reading: https://go.aws/4wBoVwD Github Repo: https://go.aws/4wyo27M Strands Agents SDK: https://go.aws/4vovJfU Follow AWS Developers! 🆇 X: https://go.aws/44GVygB 💼 LinkedIn: https://go.aws/44iV4wT #AWS #AgentHarness #StrandsAgents