Claude Certified Architect
Agentic loops, coordinator-subagent designs, tool interfaces and reliability patterns for Claude.
10concepts
82flashcards
86minutes of reading
- 01 Agentic Loops and stop_reason Handling The agentic loop lifecycle - sending requests, inspecting stop_reason, executing tools, and appending results. The foundation of every autonomous Claude agent.
- 02 CLAUDE.md Configuration and Claude Code Workflows CLAUDE.md hierarchy, .claude/rules/ with glob patterns, custom commands and skills, plan mode vs direct execution, and CI/CD integration.
- 03 Cost and Throughput Engineering on the Claude API The levers that actually move an LLM bill — effort, batch processing, model tiering, task budgets, and deferred tool loading — what each one costs in latency or quality, and why measuring before tuning is not optional.
- 04 Programmatic Enforcement vs Prompt-Based Guidance When to use hooks and programmatic prerequisites for guaranteed compliance versus system prompt instructions for probabilistic guidance.
- 05 Prompt Engineering and Structured Output Patterns Explicit criteria, few-shot prompting, tool_use with JSON schemas, validation-retry loops, and the Message Batches API.
- 06 Tool Interface Design and MCP Integration Writing effective tool descriptions, structured error responses, MCP server scoping, and the distinction between MCP tools and resources.
- 07 Context Lifecycle: Editing, Compaction, and Memory Three different mechanisms manage a long-running Claude agent's context — clearing stale tool results, summarising history server-side, and persisting files across sessions — and choosing wrongly between them is one of the most common architecture mistakes.
- 08 Context Management and Reliability Patterns Context preservation across long interactions, escalation decision-making, error propagation in multi-agent systems, and information provenance.
- 09 Multi-Agent Coordinator-Subagent Architecture Hub-and-spoke multi-agent design with coordinator delegation, isolated subagent context, parallel execution, and iterative refinement loops.
- 10 Prompt Caching Economics for Claude Agents Caching is a prefix match, so one interpolated timestamp can make an entire agent uncacheable; the architecture decisions that matter are ordering and stability, not where you place the breakpoint markers.