Prepare the certification Claude Certified Architect — Foundations

Prompt Engineering and Structured Output

20% of the exam: Claude API fundamentals (stateless messages, system prompts, prefills), explicit criteria over vague instructions, few-shot prompting, JSON-schema structured output, validation/retry loops, the Message Batches API, and multi-pass review architectures.

8 lessons · 210 questions

Claude Code Configuration and Workflows

20% of the exam: the CLAUDE.md hierarchy and @path imports, path-scoped .claude/rules/, slash commands and skills (context: fork, allowed-tools, argument-hint), planning mode vs direct execution, and headless CI/CD integration.

7 lessons · 180 questions

Context Management and Reliability

15% of the exam: context windows and lost-in-the-middle, escalation and human-in-the-loop patterns, error propagation in multi-agent systems, production context management (case-facts blocks, scratchpads, trimming), provenance, and confidence calibration.

7 lessons · 180 questions

Tool Design and MCP Integration

18% of the exam: tool descriptions as the primary selection mechanism, tool_choice strategies and least-privilege tool allocation, MCP servers/resources/configuration, structured isError responses, and the Claude Code built-in toolset.

5 lessons · 150 questions

Agent Architecture and Orchestration

The heaviest exam domain (27%): the agentic loop and stop_reason flow control, coordinator–subagent (hub-and-spoke) systems, explicit context passing, lifecycle hooks vs prompt guidance for enforcement, task decomposition, and session resume/fork.

7 lessons · 180 questions