Control Your Agent With Hooks

Chapter 5 of the Building AI Agent Harnesses with Strands Agents course. Last chapter was about watching the agent work. This chapter is about reaching in and changing what it does. Hooks fire at the same event points as callbacks (before/after tool calls, before/after model calls, cycle boundaries) but they can modify or cancel what's about to happen. You register a hook, it runs before the event, and if you set the cancel flag with a message, the agent receives that message as feedback and responds gracefully instead of silently failing. 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). Github Repo with Readings: https://go.aws/4wBqpHj Strands Agents SDK: https://go.aws/4buz6L4 Follow AWS Developers! 🆇 X: https://go.aws/3SPdz9E 💼 LinkedIn: https://go.aws/3T6SSpH #AWS #AgentHarness #StrandsAgents