What this is about # Domain 2 — Tool Design & MCP Integration — is 18% of the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam, across five task areas: designing tool interfaces, structuring error responses, distributing tools across agents, integrating MCP servers, and choosing built-in tools well. It’s a lighter domain than Agentic Architecture, but arguably the most immediately practical one — every point here shows up the first time you give an agent a tool that doesn’t work the way you expected.
What this is about # Domain 4 — Prompt Engineering & Structured Output — ties Claude Code Configuration & Workflows for second-heaviest domain on the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam, at 20%. Its six task areas move from how you write a prompt to how you guarantee what comes back is actually usable: explicit criteria, few-shot examples, schema-enforced output, validation loops, multi-instance review, and batch processing for scale.
What this is about # Claude Certified Architect – Foundations is Anthropic’s certification for designing Claude systems, not just using them. Where the Claude Certified Associate exam tests whether you can operate Claude with professional discipline — good prompts, sound judgment on output, the right entry point for the job — the Architect exam tests something a level up: can you design the agentic system, the tool integrations, and the configuration that other people build on top of. The ideal candidate has 6+ months of hands-on experience building with the Claude API, the Claude Agent SDK, Claude Code, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) — this isn’t a first certification, it’s the next one.
What this is about # Domain 5 — Context Management & Reliability — is the lightest domain on the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam at 15%, but its six task areas cover what decides whether a long-running agent stays trustworthy: preserving critical facts across long interactions, knowing when to escalate, letting a multi-agent system recover from failure instead of silently degrading, managing context at scale, and calibrating how much to trust the output.
What this is about # Domain 3 — Claude Code Configuration & Workflows — ties Prompt Engineering & Structured Output for second-heaviest domain on the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam, at 20%. Its six task areas are all about how you set up and drive Claude Code itself: configuration file hierarchy, custom commands and skills, conditional rules, choosing plan mode vs. diving straight in, iterating well, and wiring Claude Code into CI/CD.
What this is about # Domain 1 — Agentic Architecture & Orchestration — is the single heaviest domain on the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam, worth 27% on its own. The exam guide breaks it into seven task areas: the agentic loop, multi-agent orchestration, subagent configuration, multi-step workflows, SDK hooks, task decomposition, and session management. That’s a lot of ground, so this post condenses it into the five ideas that actually carry the weight, with the smaller two folded into a quick round-up at the end.
What this is # This wraps up the Becoming a Claude Architect series with a self-check: 100 practice questions, 20 per domain, covering everything from Domain 1 — Agentic Architecture & Orchestration through Domain 5 — Context Management & Reliability. Click an answer and you’ll see immediately whether it’s right, with a short explanation either way.
