Claude Certified Architect – Foundations

About this book

Second Edition, July 2026. Prepare for the Claude Certified Architect exam with a scenario-driven study guide built for real production thinking.

Building on the First Edition’s six production scenario blueprints and chapter-level review questions, the Second Edition adds deeper production reasoning, refreshed terminology and a new incident-diagnosis section.

What’s new in the Second Edition

• Certification terminology aligned to Claude Certified Architect, Foundations
• Clearer guidance on Structured Outputs, JSON outputs, strict tool use, tool_choice and semantic validation
• Updated treatment of Claude Code skills, legacy commands, scoped tools, permissions, hooks and workflow boundaries
• Stronger guidance on production-safe agent design: deterministic controls, retries, idempotency, context preservation, human approval and escalation
• Appendix B: Production Architecture Incident Room, with ten incident dossiers where you inspect traces, tool calls, approval evidence and runtime symptoms to diagnose duplicate refunds, stale approvals, overloaded MCP tool catalogues, weak subagent boundaries and hidden permission escalation

The book covers

• Agentic loops, tool use, stop_reason and runtime control flow
• Multi-agent design with coordinators, subagents, handoffs and scoped tools
• Claude Code configuration: CLAUDE.md, rules, skills, slash commands, plan mode and non-interactive automation
• MCP tools, resources, server configuration, error handling and permission boundaries
• Prompt engineering patterns that reduce ambiguity and unsupported conclusions
• Structured output with JSON schemas, validation, retries, semantic checks and human review
• Long-context reliability, provenance, conflict handling and trustworthy synthesis
• Scenario-based review questions with detailed answer explanations

Throughout, architecture diagrams, decision tables and Exam Lens, Architect Rule, Watch Out and Key Shift boxes help you understand why the correct answer is correct and why distractors are tempting.

An independent study guide, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.